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British appeal for hackers

Saturday, 16 June 2007

Next week-end the prestigious Alexandra Palace in London, will host hundreds of web developers who are gathering in the British Capital to join an Hackday organized by the BBC and Yahoo.

The event is actually an occasion to show web developers how to get more out of the data feeds and interfaces the two organisations make available, the BBC reports.

Seminars and laboratories will be held by developers from both the BBC and Yahoo.

Matt Cashmore, development producer for the BBC, said the hackday event at Alexandra Palace was a chance for those in the Backstage developer community to meet and swap ideas.
"The developers get a fantastic depth of information about how they can open up our content and resources," he said.

The idea was to encourage groups of developers to work on new projects and create prototypes of new applications. How? Allowing IT professionals to have “free-style” hacking session that, in the intentions of the organizers, could lead to unexpected discoveries. For instance, Yahoo spokesman told that during last Yahoo hackday one group came up with a blogging purse that had a pedometer and camera phone built in so it could take a snap every 100 steps that was then uploaded to a blog.

The spirit of the event is reminded by Mr, Cashmore when talking about prizes: the best hack of the week end would win a prize but the event is not focused on showing off coding skills.
"It's doing it for the love of doing it," he said.

Undoubtedly this event could be an effective form of advertising for both the organizing companies but we could also consider it as an example to follow: normally, hacking is seen as something negative, whereas such events could cast a light on the real purposes of what we consider as a real science.

Comments Index (Total Messages: 2)

nice Written by vrossi on 2007-07-21 13:39:01

I think its a great idea Written by Guest on 2007-07-30 21:44:17

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