Hackathons are gaining popularity very fast nowadays and product companies are using this approach more and more to engage the ecosystem - an easy, interesting and a fun way to drive adoption of the new technologies that are introduced in the market. The word Hackathon has now found its way on wikipedia and the definition says- "The word "hackathon" is a portmanteau of the words "hack" and "marathon", where "hack" is used in the sense of playful, exploratory programming, not its alternate meaning as a reference to computer crime. The term seems to have been created independently by both the developers of OpenBSD and the marketing team of Sun; these usages both first happened in 1999."
Hackathons (aka Hackdays) aren't new to IBMers and over past few years we at IBM witnessed more than 10 Hackdays - which initially use to be an annual event and now it is a quarterly affair with a different theme every quarter and done in every corner of the company where technical prowess lies. The feat typically happens on the same day WW with local events with lots of fun, frolic and food to charm the participants.. Here's an interesting blog from our VP, CIO and "social business" evangelist Janet Horan- blog link
It is quite common for IBM and many other companies to start something internally and when it is found to be working well, take it out for use with customers/partners and the ecosystem. For example, I have found many IBM sellers talk through their customers on the IBM Internal Directory "Bluepages" and influenced the sale by showcasing such IBM "internal" best practices. Hackday probably is going to be no different. The last year we thought of taking the Hackday out with universities and I worked closely with my colleagues in IBM India University Relations to structure this as a "Hackathon" and a topic close to hearts of the academia – "Cloud" and “Open Source”.
Hackathons (aka Hackdays) aren't new to IBMers and over past few years we at IBM witnessed more than 10 Hackdays - which initially use to be an annual event and now it is a quarterly affair with a different theme every quarter and done in every corner of the company where technical prowess lies. The feat typically happens on the same day WW with local events with lots of fun, frolic and food to charm the participants.. Here's an interesting blog from our VP, CIO and "social business" evangelist Janet Horan- blog link
It is quite common for IBM and many other companies to start something internally and when it is found to be working well, take it out for use with customers/partners and the ecosystem. For example, I have found many IBM sellers talk through their customers on the IBM Internal Directory "Bluepages" and influenced the sale by showcasing such IBM "internal" best practices. Hackday probably is going to be no different. The last year we thought of taking the Hackday out with universities and I worked closely with my colleagues in IBM India University Relations to structure this as a "Hackathon" and a topic close to hearts of the academia – "Cloud" and “Open Source”.
The Cloud Hackathon was launched by IBM India University Relations program on 21st Jan with an intent to promote awareness and development of skills relevant to Open Cloud technologies viz. Openstack, Cloud Foundry & OpsCode Chef among students. An excellent opportunity for students to Learn, Compete and Win some exciting prizes and opportunity to work with IBMers on interesting Open Cloud projects as part of the Global Remote Mentoring program.
The event is structured in 3 phases – the Ideation, Hack time and finally phase III Demo/Presentation. The phase I was launched on 21st Jan, it started off with a series of webinars and concluded on 14th February. Students were expected to submit just the ideas about what they would like to build on either Openstack, Opscode Chef or Cloud Foundry. We had a great response from the student community and many of the 150+ ideas we received were of great and relevance to what we were doing in the labs at IBM.
The next sequel of this blog will be around some of the actual ideas and how some of the participants are doing with their implementations in Phase II
