kid's allright

Today (Friday, September 12) is Yahoo! Open Hack Day. The Yahoo! campus was buzzing yesterday. Volunteers were getting prepped with handout materials; developers were scrambling to get final bugs squashed; presenters (me included!) were (still are!) readying their presentations and demos; IT was tweaking a massive public wi-fi network; and facilities was running around getting rooms ready and a stage set up. It’s a massive effort that is really powerful for the effect it has on the company. An amazing spirit of collaboration really comes out around this event among the Yahoo! employees. A nice positive vibe is hanging in the air.

Some brief history is in order.

My former colleague and friend Chad Dickerson kicked off the Hack program at Yahoo! back in 2005 — the year we both started at Yahoo! — as an internal event that provided a way for Yahoo! developers to show their stuff and innovate. I’ve written about the Hack format on this blog a few times. It’s quite simple. You get 24 hours to take an idea from concept to working prototype, and then you get 90 seconds to demo your prototype to a panel of judges and a room full of peers. Chad envisioned a Yahoo! where everyone had a platform to show off their creativity and ingenuity, and he made it happen. Founding Hack @ Yahoo! has probably been one of the most lasting and positive individual contributions anyone has ever made at Yahoo!.

In 2006, Chad and some of the Hack crowd decided that Yahoo! engineers alone shouldn’t have all the fun. They registered http://hackday.org and put up a site that stated simply and plainly that “Open Hack was coming” with a date approximately six weeks in the future.

They set a goal, and then they went to town to define it with tactics and programs. What they ended up with six weeks later was pretty amazing. The first Yahoo! Open Hack Day was a two day event that anyone on the web could request access to attend. Day 1, a Friday, featured a day of talks about developer-facing Yahoo! technologies, capped with an evening performance of pretty serious note. On Day 2, hackers hacked and then there was judging. There’s plenty of great coverage on the web about it, but this video by one of the participants, Mo Kakwan, captures the spirit better than any press coverage ever could.

Since 2006, Yahoo! has held two other Open Hack events: one in London and one in Bangalore, India.

The event returns to Sunnyvale today, September 12, and tomorrow. The format is relatively unchanged, with talks by Yahoo! folks on Friday, some killer entertainment Friday night, and a day of hacking and demoing on Saturday by the participants. The difference between this year and 2006 is the amount of care and energy Yahoo! as an entire company is putting into our developer efforts. We have lots of new stuff to talk about and for you to hack on, including things like Searchmonkey, BOSS, GeoPlanet, FireEagle, MyBlogLog API and the Y! Music API that launched earlier this year to a number of new Y!OS components that we’ll be previewing for the first time. I’m very eager to hear feedback from folks on these things. And I’m eager to see how creative everyone can be with them.

If you are coming to Hack Day this weekend, please look me up. I’d love to meet you. I’ll be giving the first talk of the day at 10am today (Friday) — Yahoo! Open Strategy: An Overview — and I’ll be moderating an OpenSocial discussion in the afternoon. I’ll otherwise pretty much just be around during the event, talking to folks and helping people where I can. I hope to see you there.

If you can’t make it here, you can also follow the event on Twitter and Flickr.

Cheers!
-c