Humanitarian Toolbox to Deliver Open Software for Good Causes

by Ostatic Staff - Sep. 24, 2013

Here at OStatic, we've covered open source software aimed at humanitarian causes before, including tools from called InSTEDD (Innovative Support to Emergencies, Diseases and Disasters). Now, a very interesting new startup called Humanitarian Toolbox has appeared, and is focused on open source tools for humanitarian causes. Team mebers from NetHope, CrisisCommons and GeeksWithoutBounds have announced, in partnership with Microsoft and DotNetRocks the launch of the new company.

The Humanitarian Toolbox is characterized as an initiative to "help bring the expertise and good will of the software development community to the humanitarian world." According to the announcement:

"This is the reason we have teamed up with Microsoft, which has generously offered their Team Foundation Services as the infrastructure backbone for the Humanitarian Toolbox. By being able to break the problem statements into individual chunks of work and to clearly define each of them through storyboards, larger problems can now be addressed by this volunteer community of software developers. By having an infrastructure that also enables distributed software development also means that people can continue to work on problems even after they participate in a hackathon." "We are therefore reaching out to the broad software development community, looking for developers, designers, testers, database administrators, project managers, scrum masters and UX masters who want to give some of their time to share their expertise in software development to create solutions that will help save lives and reduce suffering."

If you're interested, you can visit the company's website, sign up to be notified when new problems get defined, follow the company on Twitter and more. Even the company's website is being developed openly and the source can be found at http://github.com/htbox/htbox-website.