Novell Hack Week: an experiment in innovation

An idea rooted in open source culture

According to legendary scientist Albert Einstein, "everything that is really great and inspiring is created by the individual who can labor in freedom." Perhaps that is why open-source software is such fertile ground for innovation. Surrounded by a culture of freedom in an ecosystem where liberty and empowerment are the end as well as the means, open-source software developers are radically transforming the way that many businesses and individuals use and create software. Last month, Novell decided to push the limits of developer empowerment and perform an elaborate experiment in innovation by liberating the company's entire Linux engineering team for one full week of free hacking.

During Novell Hack Week, hundreds of skilled developers employed by Novell at various facilities around the world worked together on open-source projects of their choice. Driven by creativity and passion instead of deadlines, instructions, and executive decisions, Novell's best and brightest created impressive new software and added innovative improvements to existing programs. In order to facilitate collaboration with the broader open-source software community, Novell sought to make Hack Week as transparent and inclusive as possible. Developers used Novell's OpenSUSE Idea Pool wiki to share their ideas with community and solicit feedback.

To gain an inside understanding of Hack Week, we spoke with several Novell developers who shared their experiences and provided fascinating details about their unique projects. We also had an opportunity to discuss Hack Week with Novell's chief open-source strategy officer, Nat Friedman, who served as worldwide MC for the event.

Where did the Innovation Time Off concept originate and how did Novell come up with the basic idea for Hack Week?

Most of us got into Linux and open source because it was personally exciting and interesting, because we could learn something about programming from this huge base of free software, or because we had some itch to scratch. Good ideas can come from anywhere, and people tend to do their best work on the projects they're passionate about. That's central to the way open source operates.

So even though we're a big company with lots of customers and product release schedules to satisfy, we're also an open-source company. And the ideas behind ITO and Hack Week are firmly rooted in open-source culture. There are also other software companies who do this kind of thing, though it's rarer than it should be. We want all our developers to have a chance to be creative and to try something new, without having to "find time" or justify it. And as it turns out, amazing things can happen when you set a huge team of great hackers loose.

What did you do during Hack Week?

My job was to make sure Hack Week ran smoothly. Most of that work was done in advance, setting up the idea wiki and making sure everyone could find a project or a collaborator. During the week we gave out 1,500 T-shirts, three meals a day, liters of coffee and Red Bull, and recorded, edited and posted several hours of video of the event as it progressed.

I also played with the Sphinx speech recognition engines from CMU and the gnome-voice-control applet from Nickolay Shmyrev and Raphael Nunes. I broke my wrist a few years ago and learned the value of speech recognition.

What did you enjoy most about Hack Week in general and your own personal Hack Week experience?

For me it was fun to see all the different projects people worked on. Hack Week was based on the idea that our developers are creative and passionate, and it was nice to be proved right.

Do you feel like Hack Week was very productive for Novell?

Definitely. Besides the obvious projects that directly contribute to our products, it's very stimulating to work on something new, and doing it all together gives us a nice sense of what a great team we have.

Are there plans to do another Hack Week in the future? If Novell does another Hack Week, is there something that you would like to see done differently?

Absolutely. We're looking at doing it again in 6 months or so. No date is set yet, but in the future we hope to involve more participants from the community.