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BBC and Yahoo! get ready for 'Hack Day'
Mashing up a jam session

By Tim Ferguson

Published: Friday 15 June 2007

The BBC and Yahoo! are teaming up this weekend for 'Hack Day' - a one-day event in which 500 web developers from across Europe will battle it out at London's Alexandra Palace.

The developers - or 'hackers' - will spend 24 hours using existing web apps to create completely new ones, in what is billed as a 'jam session' for techies.

Techies from the BBC developer community, Backstage, and Yahoo!'s own network will use their skills to modify existing apps from both organisations to create completely new products.

Cheat Sheets

♦ Web 2.0
♦ Mash-ups

Each hacker will then show off their product in a 90 second presentation on Sunday afternoon, after which the winner will be announced.

Matt Cashmore, development producer at the BBC, told silicon.com: "We don't exactly know what will happen.

"It's just going to be mind-blowing being in the room with so many creative people."

Chad Dickerson, senior director for the Yahoo! developer network, said the developers are the "canaries in the coalmine for us", adding: "Hack Day is more about the developers and less about us."

A BBC spokeswoman said the web is quickly transforming into a development platform and Hack Day will allow developers to make their ideas a reality using the enormous scale and infrastructure of the BBC and Yahoo!.

Cashmore said Hack Day is a slightly different approach to the recent Google developer day as it focuses on what developers can do rather than educating them.

Cashmore said the event demonstrates the BBC is open to having conversations outside its own four walls. "If we're not having conversations with these people [developers], we can't move forwards," he said.

He added: "I think it's incredibly important."

Yahoo! started running hack days in 2005 but the event this weekend is the first external Hack Day to be held in Europe following a successful event at Yahoo!'s Sunnyvale, California, HQ last September.