Mind the hack: Open Hack Day London 2009

Posted May 11th, 2009 at 9:40 am by Christian Heilmann, Yahoo! UK

 One Comment / Filed in: Conferences/Events

Did you know that it is possible for eight people to use seven iPhones and two Wii controllers to play the theme song of Dr.Who? Or that you can use Twitter to follow the progress of a new bill being discussed in Parliament? If you can’t say yes to any of these questions, then you have probably never been to a Hack Day.

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(Video: The iPhone orchestra playing the Dr.Who theme)

This last weekend, 270 internet developers, designers and other technical and creative folk came to London, England to spend 24 hours hacking. They came to build what ever struck their technical fancy – whether it was something that entertained the hacker crowd or whether they found creative solutions to problems that all web users face.

Yahoo!’s eighth Open Hack Day, the second in London, attracted people from 15 countries across Europe, including two from Nigeria! Together they played with our open tools and showed what is possible when geeks take center stage in changing how we all use the web.

And change they delivered. The hackers submitted a total of 51 hacks and each individual or team had two minutes to present their prototype to the hacker audience and a panel of expert judges.

The judges, amongst which were David Filo, co-founder of Yahoo; Daniel Ek, founder of the internet music service Spotify; Matt Biddulph, CTO of travel tracking service Dopplr; and Pascal Finette of Mozilla had a hard time picking winners from among the submissions.

A few highlights of the winners are Rob McKinnon’s BillTweets, which allows you to follow news about UK parliament bills on Twitter; Purple Pedal Power by Andrew Larcombe, a way to track the journey of the Flickr bicycles (we reported earlier about); and Open Freecycle, which made Freecycle available to everyone on the web, and not only to those who are members of the Yahoo groups that power Freecycle.

A special mention goes to Chris Brett, Laurence Hole and Matthew Ross from Dundee University in Scotland, who built a clever interface that allows people with disabilities who can’t use a keyboard or mouse to search the web with the blink of an eye.

We kept the hackers happy and full of energy by providing lots of traditional British food and plenty of caffeine – 3,420 cups of coffee to be exact. This included a dinner of Bangers & Mash made from 900 sausages and 60kg of mashed potatoes on day one and Steak and Ale Pie containing 60kg of steak, 10kg of carrots and 5kg of onions on day two.

In between the tech talks and hacking, we also provided entertainment with movies, games and music, including a live band performance. Pornophonique is a two-member band from Germany that make music with a guitar and a hacked Game Boy. In the true spirit of open source, the band offers their whole album for free on the web.

Having been at several hack days across the globe during my life as a Yahoo, I have to say I love coming back to London for these events. The creativity of the hackers had no limits. We saw people control web sites by driving scooters through the building, controlling a steel guitar with a mobile phone and literally reaching for the stars with Flickr photos positioned in space. It’s a good reminder that with a group of geeks, the right tools and a weekend devoted to innovation anything is possible.

See you next time hackers!

Christian Heilmann
Yahoo Developer Network

Tagged: open hack day

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Remy | May 12th, 2009 at 6:04 am

Advancement! Love them all. Many developers are trying to make freecycle better. I wander if the email group users feel that they have a need for improvement? The latest is toolzdo.com