Yahoo! Hack Day: Building Community
Last Thursday and Friday, Yahoo! had its first ever cross-Yahoo! Hack Day.
The premise is that Yahoo! employees can take 24 hours (this one was literally noon Thursday to noon Friday) to work on
anything they want as long as they take an idea from concept to working prototype in that period. They then have to present the Hack in two minutes or less to a room full of crowded Yahoos and a panel of executive judges. This was the fourth Hack Day at Yahoo! but was the first one in which teams could come from any division of the company (the first and second Hack Days were isolated to SMG and the third Hack Day was specifically for Yahoo!’s offices in
Yahoo! is more and more beginning to be associated with communities. Whether it is Yahoo! Groups, Flickr, del.icio.us, Upcoming.org or the Yahoo! Developer Network, some of the most successful product ventures in the company’s porfolio have to do with building and encouraging online communities to grow and develop.
From an internal perspective, please add Yahoo! Hack Day to the list of successful community-buidling platforms.
As noted by Yahoo! Hack Day maestro, Chad Dickerson, and by TechCrunch-er Michael Arrington (who was in attendence) among others, Hack Day is truly an exercise in innovation and forces the creation of small, entrepreneurial teams. I love this line from TechCrunch:
“After you peel away all of the extraneous layers, the core of
innovation is five or six people building something they think is cool.
And there certainly was a lot of that going on at Yahoo at the end of
last week.”
But I want to emphasize that for our team, Hack Day extended well beyond our core group of seven people (of which the four key developers did 95% of the innovation and development). By participating in Hack Day, our entire group felt at once a part of a much larger community of like-minded people from across Yahoo!, especially knowing that 102 other similarly inclined teams from across the company’s many geographies also submitted entries into the competition. When working in a company the size of Yahoo!, and especially when working in a satellite office as we do (personal shout out to Burbank!), this feeling of inclusion, participation, and, ultimately, recognition was really inspiring.
Also, before I forget, I want to thank Chad for organizing the event. And I want to give a special thanks to the four members of our team who really took charge and made our Hack happen: Aaron Stein, Joshua Rangsikitpho, Sumit Chachra and Steve Spencer . We won an award for our Hack (which I unfortunately can’t share any details about) called “Most Money”. The panel of judges created the award on the spot in order to provide some recognition for the great work that these four guys did in their spare time, the day after a fairly major project launch…and because their Hack pretty much kicked butt. These four guys, and the other members of our development group, have been delivering top notch services for a while now, mostly to internal customers within the company. It is awesome to see them get some well-deserved open recognition for their talents in front of the community of innovators from across the company with which we work.
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