Who Owns Hackathon Inventions? | Alan Steele – Harvard Business Review


I recently served as a mentor at a hackathon and came away shaking my head. In hackathons, teams compete intensively, typically for just a day or two, to create software (and sometimes hardware) solutions. What struck me was that most of the participants — young, tech-savvy programmers, engineers, and others — seemed largely uninformed or unconcerned about intellectual property. Participants tend to come from many different organizations, and often view hackathons as recreational social events, so perhaps they can be forgiven for not focusing on IP. But the companies they come from need to pay attention — or risk losing valuable IP.

See the full article at: Who Owns Hackathon Inventions? | Alan Steele – Harvard Business Review

 

TechCrunch | White House Announces National Day Of Civic Hacking, Asks Americans To Solve Problems With Govt Data From NASA And More


The Canadian Government needs to pilot a program like this! Unfortunately, I can’t imagine this happening with a Harper government. We need to advocate for more open data and a transparent government, especially with government budgets and programs funded by taxpayer wallets.

White House Announces National Day Of Civic Hacking, Asks Americans To Solve Problems With Govt Data From NASA And More | TechCrunch.

N.B. At the bottom of the article is a map of America…all the cities that have signed up are quite similar to the distribution of Democratic states.  Also can’t see a Republican government launching a program like this. Obama rocks.

Gabriella Coleman | Geek Researcher Spends Three Years Living With Hackers


Geek Researcher Spends Three Years Living With Hackers | Wired Enterprise | Wired.com

I’m sure Gabriella Coleman’s upcoming book Coding Freedom: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking will be a fascinating read!  I completed an Information Security weekend workshop during my MLIS program and we discussed hacking and how easy it is for hackers to compromise systems. We also discussed pros and cons of hacktivism. I would have to take a full-credit course in Information Security but it was not offered at the time. I could see Coleman’s research integrating well within the curriculum.

The Anthropology of Hackers syllabus-as-essay via The Atlantic

Hacker (Forthcoming, The John Hopkins Encyclopedia of Digital Textuality)

Gabriella Coleman video Hacktivism: Political Hacking’s Global Reach, From Scientology to Wikileaks to the Arab Spring on DemocracyNow.org