A hack day is an event where developers, designers and people with ideas gather to build 'cool stuff' [1] - the events now run all over the world and are organised by a wide variety of people, companies, and even government departments.
They appear with several different names - the words 'hack day' are not required for the event to be a 'hack day'. Yahoo! have started to differentiate their Hack Days by calling them Open Hack Day, whilst others use terms more appropriate to their specific area of interest such as 'Over The Air' [2] or more esoteric such as 'Mashed08' [3]
The 'days' are generally run over 48 hours. The first day starts with talks about practical matters (how to access datasets and APIs) as well more inspirational matters to encourage developers and designers to think beyond their normal areas of interest - in 2008 the BBC, Hack Day at Alexandra Palace (called Mashed08 [4])had talks from NASA[5] as well as the Yahoo! Developer Network [6] and backstage.bbc.co.uk[7]
The first internal Hack Day at Yahoo took place on December 8, 2005. The first public Hack Day took place between September 29-30th of 2006 at the Yahoo! campus in Sunnyvale, California and was followed by a performance by Beck.
The format of the Hack Day shares characteristics with several other types of event, including unconferences, MashPit, Foocamp and BarCamp, but generally follows this format:
Day 1
Day 2
Entertainment is sometimes provided (see Beck at Yahoo! Hack Day in Sunnyvale, California and The Rumble Strips at the joint Yahoo!, BBC Hack Day in 2007) on the final evening or as a 'break' in the event on the Saturday night.
The format is incredibly flexible and is changed to suit the needs of the particular event. For example you can run 'Hack Days' as simple 'Hack Evenings' - a term that acknowledges the essence of the event, without having to be structured over a 48 hour period.[8]
Yahoo! has been the subject of complaint after it invited 'Hack Girls' to perform at its Open Hack Day 2009 in Taipei.[9] Yahoo! posted a blog entry [10] saying sorry about the decision and for any offence it may have caused.
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The first public Hack Day took place between September 29-30th of 2006 at the Yahoo! campus in Sunnyvale, California and was followed by a performance by Beck.
Hack Day London was held in June 2007 at North London's Alexandra Palace. A joint event between backstage.bbc.co.uk and the Yahoo! Developer Network for several hundred developers and designers, it was hit by lightning on the Saturday morning and followed by a performance by The Rumble Strips.
A second event was held at Congress House in Summer 2009.
Hackday India was held on October 5 and 6th,2007 in Bangalore . The first Hackday in India featured about 100 hackers who took to Yahoo! APIs to create something using them in 24 hours. In the end, there were 31 submitted hacks and each team or single hacker had his/her 90 seconds of fame presenting the hack on three massive screens to the whole assembled audience and the 7 judges to declare the results of the hackday India 2007.
Over The Air is a yearly event [11] run in London. It is a hack day combined with a concurrent developer conference featuring informational and educational sessions on different topics, with a focus on mobile platforms and technologies. It ran at Imperial College London in 2008[12] [13], 2009[14] and 2010[15] and will be running at Bletchley Park in 2011.[16]
Mashed08 [17] was the first large scale Hack Day run without Yahoo!. It was organised by backstage.bbc.co.uk and concentrated on creating a 'festival of hacking'.[18] Speakers were invited from Yahoo!, BBC as well as NASA and other interesting organisations. It ran at Alexandra Palace in North London on 21 and 22 June 2008.
Hackday Brazil was held on November 8 and 9th 2008, and then on March 20 and 21 2010, in São Paulo.
Yahoo has spread their hack day idea to universities around the country. Hack U has been going on since 2006. That year Greg Schechter from UIUC won the national contest with his Slide Rule Widget. Check out the video of his winning presentation.
First Hackday Russia was held on September 5 and 6 2009 in Saint-Petersburg.
A government sponsored hack day run by webdirections in Australia.[19] The first event happened in Canberra at the Australian National University in partnership with CSIRO on the 30 and 31 October 2009
A Hack Day run by Lonely Planet[20] in partnership with GovHack. Run out of the Lonely Planet HQ in Footscray, Melbourne the event ran on the 7 and 8 November 2009.
Design and engineering firm Arup held their first Hack Day, ArupHack09 on 20 and 21 November 2009. It was run as a global event with participants in Australia, UK and North America linked via video conference.
The first Slovak Hackday was held on October 8 and 9th 2010 in Bratislava. [21] It was organised by Fair-play Aliance (NGO) and concentrated on public control and visualization of 'flows of public finances'.
Science Hack Days have been organized in London and San Francisco: [22]
Over a dozen Music Hack Days have been organized around the world: [23]
One of the first Edu Hack Day's is taking place on November 12 + 13, 2011 in Baltimore, Maryland, see http://EducationHackDay.org. Other Edu Hack Days are also being planned, like the one in NYC in Jan 2012. [24]
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