It was a weekend of synthesis brought about by what Toronto organizer Heather Leson called "brains colliding."  The RHoK events bring together disaster relief and climate change organizations and a variety of programmers and developers to see if they can generate new solutions to old problems -- in the space of a single weekend.  The Random Hacks of Kindness umbrella organization was founded in 2009 by Google, Yahoo!, the World Bank, NASA, and Microsoft. This weekend was its third international event, and saw teams competing locally in places as far-flung as Bangalore, India and Buenos Aires, Argentina.  World Bank Digital Strategist and RHoK Nairobi organizer Will Pate was proud to point out that almost every single person at RHoK Nairobi stayed the whole 36 hours, eating and sleeping at the hackathon, to get their projects done.  "What was really exciting was seeing a group of young people who are very talented just dive right in and be so dedicated that they stayed overnight."  You might not think even the smartest computer wizards could build much in just a day or two. But you'd be wrong.  RHoK events often end with fully functional products. And the products they create are as diverse as the teams that made them.  In Sao Paolo, Brazil, the main focus was on tools relating to flooding and landslides. Organizer and World Bank Disaster Risk Consultant Aires Zulian Nunes da Conceicao said the top prize-winning hacks there both dealt with new, inexpensive ways to track and understand rainfall and to educate Brazilians about disaster risk.  At the end of the conference, a new kind of synthesis was already occurring.  "We had nine problems with solutions in Sao Paolo, and after the event, the groups were coordinating a collaboration, putting all those solutions together into one package of software," he said. "Hacks to identify risks, in the event to find survivors and use social media to connect them, and then to fix things and manage costs post-event."
What was the best moment of Willow Brugh's weekend?"Someone stood up on a chair (and) asked if anyone had Arduino skills," she said, in reference to the programming platform. "And someone jogged