Ever since Jerry and I started Yahoo! 11 years ago, we’ve made it a priority to stay loyal to our developer roots — creating useful and significant products that make the Internet more relevant to the global community. Along the way we’ve met a lot of developers with the same goals.

This loose network of “hackers” has gelled into a large connected community that takes an untraditional approach to creating new applications, products and services, much as Yahoo! has done in the last decade. For this community, hacking is a good thing — yielding ideas and innovations that are clever, creative and original.

We don’t claim to have supreme knowledge to be able to come up with the best solutions. We look to Yahoo! developers and users to contribute their ideas, and to take to the next level the enormous scale and infrastructure that Yahoo! is proud to be able to provide.

And we don’t want to hog it — the spirit of openness that is pervasive at Yahoo! will prevail this weekend as 500 developers from as far away as Australia, Canada, Florida and Chicago (and as close as the next exit down the freeway) descend on our campus tomorrow for our first Open Hack Day.

This will be the first time we've opened up the Yahoo! campus to developers from outside the company. We’ll give them lots of coffee and lots of space to be creative, and just under 24 hours to demonstrate their creativity and originality. At the end, hack demos will be judged by a panel of luminaries, and special awards given for the coolest hacks. And we’re really excited about the amazing musical guest performing on campus Friday night, which should be a great start to the hack-a-thon and the perfect way to get our creative juices flowing.

The biggest thing that has made Yahoo! successful has been the community we’ve been able to build, and the developer community is one of the most passionate constituents I’ve seen. I can’t wait to see what they come up with this weekend!