Hackers For Charity Projects
Education and Training
As hackers, we believe that knowledge is power, and one of the best ways to empower those in need is to provide free educational resources and distinct learning paths.
We have worked for nearly a decade with several trusted partners to produce educational solutions that allow anyone, regardless of age, skill or internet connectivity access to quality job skill and technical resources.
These projects include offline education initiatives, security awareness training, computer training classrooms and centers, and STEAM and Maker Training Initiatives.
Read more about the resources we have used, the organizations we have worked with in this space, or get involved by joining our community.
Disaster Response and Relief
Hackers have donated their skills and resources to disaster relief for decades, often jumping in well before larger organizations can mobilize. We are agile, natural problem solvers with high-tech skills in many areas of technology well-suited to disaster response.
As we’ve organized, we’ve learned a thing or two about what works in disaster response and relief scenarios.
Read more about the resources we have used, the organizations we have worked with in this space, or get involved by joining our community.
Community Service
“Hacker” is not synonymous with “criminal”. The overwhelming majority of us are security professionals securing the resources you depend on every day. We are active members of our local communities and once word gets out that we are “computer people” we help our neighbors with our technical expertise as we troubleshoot and repair their tech gear and network setups.
As individuals, we frequently serve our communities in small ways, but as a group, we engage in community service on a larger scale.
We have performed community service projects worldwide. To get involved or learn more, join our community.
Leather Program
Our leather program started as a simple idea to provide job skills to Ugandans that had lost everything in a local village fire. Thanks to the support of the hacker community, we raised enough money to provide food for the victims and rebuild their homes. As donations continued to come in, we realized that our rebuild hadn’t helped long-term since many of the victims didn’t have jobs or skills.
Johnny and Jen used remaining donation money to purchase tools and equipment and they learned leather crafting using materials from a local tannery that had been exporting its leather. Eventually they learned enough to begin teaching and the program grew from there. The program is still in operation today. Read more about our program here.
Our Stories
Owned. Or not. Crap.
So there's this shipment. It's an experiment, but a rather important one. When I tell people I'm going to Uganda to teach people how to use computers because it will [...]
Someone is confused about what we do
For the record, this is not what we do. =) This is samuel from liberia,a west africa country, I would like you to teach meabout using googles to hack credit [...]
Hackers For Charity Newsletter #1: August 2009
It's here! [download id="31"] Check out our first shiny newsletter. It took me five hours to upload it. Catch up with all that HFC is up to!
Raw Patch Management Survey Data (Project Quant)
Over at Securosis we've been working on a big project (called Project Quant) with Microsoft to develop a rigorous patch management metrics model. We ended up with a 40+ page report including over a hundred metrics in a 10 phase, 40 step patch management process framework. You can read about it here. This was a community project, with participation from a bunch of different people and groups. But, for this community, the more interesting part was the survey we conducted. We performed an open survey on patch management processes that included some of the biggest, and smallest, organizations around (and are keeping the survey open). While we released a summary analysis with the initial project report, we are now releasing the raw survey data. This data has been anonymized, but otherwise unaltered. We had about 116 responses when I did this data dump, and keep in mind the results likely skewed towards more mature organizations (since they'd be more incented to participate). This data will be exclusive here at the Informer for one week before we release it to the broader community.