US Government Announces National Day of Civic Hacking 102
An anonymous reader writes "Yesterday in a post at the White House website, the U.S. government announced that June 1-2 would be the National Day of Civic Hacking. 'Civic Hacking Day is an opportunity for software developers, technologists, and entrepreneurs to unleash their can-do American spirit by collaboratively harnessing publicly-released data and code to create innovative solutions for problems that affect Americans.' It will be a joint project with Random Hacks of Kindness, Code for America. Activities are being planned in many cities across the country, and you can also sign up to host your own event. It's nice to see the government use the word 'hacking' in a positive way, since most uses of the term these days involve malicious activity."
Apparently one Aaron Swartz was not enough. (Score:4, Interesting)
Be careful out there. [slashdot.org] This isn't a true call to hacking, it is a call for free labor.
Re:The feds promoting 'hacking'? (Score:2, Interesting)
I know it's all perspective, and this is just mine, but I see more appropriate uses all the time now. Business rags like to talk about large tech companies having their hackathons and unknown devs "hacking" on their personal projects. The whole "maker" thing, which is (dare I say) trendy now, uses the word all the time. And we're well out of the 90's, when computers were transitioning from mystery AOL terminals to tools that almost everyone grew up using. I do feel like we're swinging back from the hollywood version of the word, and this is a good example.
Though I suppose you could argue that both uses weren't that distant from each other in the first place. Just a thought.