Social innovation

Building open source solutions for the greater good

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The Social Innovation Program leverages Red Hat’s open source capabilities through our skills, consulting services, training services and/or product to support nonprofit organizations with their mission critical open source humanitarian or environmental technological solutions. Red Hat builds partnerships across public, private, and nonprofit sectors to foster collaboration towards building better open source solutions towards the benefit of all.

Why is it crucial to use open source in the social innovation/social corporate responsibility technological space?

Open source can help solve big global shared problems together by enabling collaboration and innovation for the benefit of humanity. Below the main benefits:

  • Enables collaboration across sectors and across different organizations so you can tackle big world problems together (ex, addressing clean air in a city and having a solution where the city, nonprofits and researchers can all collaborate on the problem),

  • Enables innovation in the nonprofit space by allowing these solutions to keep evolving and improving (ex. a nonprofit working on food waste in India creates an open source solution that another nonprofit working on the same issue in Africa can use, repurpose, and instead of creating it from scratch they use their time and effort to add a new feature to this same solution) 

  • Reduces vendor lock-in with mission critical technological solutions

The UN has already identified open source as one of their directives when it comes to technology, so they have already realized the potential and the need to use open source.

Check out our main collaborations below.

Red Hat Social Innovation

WHO: How a learning platform is transforming global health

UNICEF: An ambitious project to map schools on a global scale

FIWARE powers eco-smart cities in collaboration with the Red Hat Social Innovation Program

Curriki: Democratizing education with open e-learning solutions

Greenpeace: An open invitation to help the planet

Software as a heritage for humanity: How Ceph will help store and preserve code for future generations

Icon-Red_Hat-Media_and_documents-Quotemark_Open-B-Red-RGB Since 2018, Red Hat’s Social Innovation Program has contributed consulting and training services valued at more than US$1 million to open source projects from nonprofit organizations.

Red Hat Impact

Through Red Hat Impact, Red Hatters are enabled to contribute their skills to impactful open source community projects. Red Hat Impact is Red Hat’s skills-based volunteering program that structures and supports initiatives that provide Red Hatters with the opportunity to contribute their skills to socially and environmentally-focused open source projects.

In 2020, Red Hatters donated 5,000+ hours to external open source projects dedicated to overcoming the challenges brought about by COVID-19. In 2021, Red Hatters donated 4,000+ hours to open source projects in the open education and open science spaces. 120 Red Hatters contributed to the Red Hat Inspire Hackathon and submitted over 150 commits, added 17,600 lines of code, and reviewed over 72,000 metadata tags.

Additional resources:

Using open source and open data to address racial and educational disparities

Technology as a Source for Good

The power of open source during a pandemic

The power of collaborative public health intelligence from publicly available sources and open source software to fight a pandemic - EIOS

Hackathons power open source technology and innovative research

Building better communities with streaming data and machine learning using FIWARE

Can streaming data and machine learning build better communities?

Red Hat Impact

If you are interested in getting in touch with the Red Hat Social Innovation program, please fill out this form.
 

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