It has become a tradition that OKFN Belgium plays a part in Random Hacks of Kindness: a weekend where programmers hack for a better world. OKFN Belgium will be present with a couple of Geospatial datasets from the Flemish provincial tourism organization. The datasets are on their way to be opened: all horseback riding paths in Flanders, all bike routes and all hikers’ routes.

On 1-2 June 2013, the EJC and De Persgroep, the leading media company in the Flemish/Dutch media landscape, will be hacking with the coders and programmers at the Random Hacks of Kindness hackathon in Belgium.

In the past years, we were confronted with a various kinds of natural/man-made disasters in the world. While a number of digital tools support the newsgathering process, a big challenge remains for journalists to quickly mine the relevant crowdsourced contents when unexpected events such as shootings and extreme weather conditions threaten peoples’ lives.

Better communication ecosystem would lead into more effective process of disaster mitigation, preparedness, response and recovery. Information is a commodity that is needed in order to sustain human lives when crises and disasters occur. Needless to mention, journalists play an important role in providing accurate information to the public and disaster-affected communities.

At the hackathon, the organisers would like to create the foundation for a sustainable, open framework where news journalists can find the relevant news and social media contents in real-time. It will be a first step forward to establish a newsgathering/ content-mining tool that can be used by various newsrooms, including small/medium-sized ones with limited resources.

Want to be part of this? Register now!