On Friday, I had the opportunity to sit in on a pre-event briefing for Yahoo!  The event in question – Yahoo! Open Hack Day.  If you have not yet heard about the event, here are the essential details:

Yahoo! Open Hack Day 2006
Location: Yahoo! Headquarters
Start Date: Friday, September 29, 5pm
End Date: Saturday, September 30, 6pm
http://hackday.org

Essentially, Open Hack Day is an opportunity for developers, mashers and interested spectators to jump in and have a chance to work on their own hacks using the extensive Yahoo! APIs as well as their own creative secret sauce.  Expect 100 or more Yahoos to be on campus wearing special t-shirts or hats that guide you to their expertise.

The event is structured as a coding/camping event – taking its roots from Bar Camp and Foo Camp.  There will be great food, lots of drinks, and “unbelievably awesome entertainment” – read a secret band that fits the groove of the whole hack culture.

There’s 3 simple rules for participation:

  1. Build something that can be taken from idea to working prototype in one day
  2. At the end of the day, we will celebrate what you’ve done on Hack Day with demos of hacks and awards for the coolest ones.  “Judging is just the respect of your peers,” says Brad Horowitz, VP of Product Strategy.
  3. Do your demo FAST! (under two minutes)

You can find out more at the URL above.  They’re expecting close to 500 people in total so I imagine it’s a great time in the making.  As Chad Dickerson noted, “Hack Day has turned into a celebration of what people are doing all the time.”

More importantly, though, it seems worth mentioning how important the concept of Hack is at Yahoo!  Most of the presentation we saw was actually about the manner in which this subversive behavior is infiltrating at least one part of Yahoo!  Bradley Horowitz, VP of Product Strategy, said it best:

“they’re totally buying in.  I have tried to get fired for the last 2 years…  This is not lip service at all.  The reason we’re doing this, to be clear, … we believe this is actually good for business.  We’re not doing this as a community service.  We’re not doing this as a stunt.  We believe this is critical to the future of Yahoo!”

If anything was clear – they take this all very serious, but they’re having a great time as well.

More coverage can be seen here: