Imagine a company inviting hackers to enter their buildings, their computer networks, and to modify their software. Yahoo! recently invited over 500 people to do just that. Open Hack Day featured musicians, helpful Yahoo! employees, lots of pizza, and hundreds of curious engineers from around the country. At the end of the festivities, Diana Eng, a former Project Runway contestant, and her friends won a prize for the best hack. They created a purse that allowed a user to take photographs every few minutes and automatically upload the images to Flickr, a Yahoo! photo-sharing web site.
Hacking has had a renaissance over the past year. What was once a term used to describe shadowy characters is now a tool for improving your company and its products. Yahoo!, Google, Microsoft, and other companies are encouraging their employees to hack their products. Yahoo! hosts quarterly internal Hack Days, perhaps your company should too.
Hack Day Essentials
It’s easy to set up a Hack Day with your company. There are only a few ground rules and lots of rewards.
Rule #1: 24 hours of unfettered hacking.
Participation in Hack Days should be voluntary and the participants need time to hack. They have 24 hours to co-ordinate, develop, build, and publish their hack. Their supervisors need to allow time in their schedule for this activity. At Yahoo!, hackers are given signs for their desks to remind people they are in the midst of a hack.
Rule #2: Anyone can hack! Everything can be hacked!
Hacking is not only about software. Hackers don’t have to be engineers. Let’s look at a sample company.
Sunnyside Breadery is a successful bakery/cafe in an urban neighborhood. They decide to close the cafe early one Sunday for their hack day. The ovens are left on and the employees are invited to experiment in the kitchen and office. Mona, who busses tables, and Jim, the baker, work together to develop a Dulce de Leche brownie.. Grace, the barista, sets up a MySpace account to share cafe activities online. George, the cafe owner, tries to create a challah cupcake and fails miserably. The accounting team re-arranges the cafe tables and chairs for better traffic flow.
The next morning, everyone gathers around to share their results. The brownie is put into production and becomes a big success. Everyone agrees it was a fun way to make a difference at work.
While not every hack will be successful, it’s important to have fun and be supportive of each other. Yahoo! Hack Days typically result in 2-3 projects that are patented and many are put into production.
Rule #3: Reward the hackers
At the end of the Hack Day, give out awards for the best hack, the funniest hack, the most spirited, etc. Have some t-shirts, stickers, and other goodies available to thank people for their time.
Hacking Recap
Hacking can be fun and productive for your company. Internal Hack Days may result in new products, more efficient processes, happier employees, and fast, cheap innovation. Join the roster of companies finding gold in their internal hackers.