hackers

As a parent of three (children aged: 10, 7, and 5), I'm eager to share with my kids the values that attracted me to open source and the hacker ethos: sharing and building great things together, taking control of your environment, and embracing technology as a means of expression, rather than as media to be consumed. In other words: » Read more

It might sound strange, but every industry and profession could benefit from an employee as creative, resourceful, and motivated as a hacker. Hackers can teach themselves how things work and how groups of things work together. Hackers know how to modify things—to adjust, personalize, and even improve them. And it is the hacker whose skillset is diverse, unique, and powerful enough to be dangerous in the hands of the wrong person. Enter ISECOM—a non-profit, open source research group focused on next-generation security and professional security development and accreditation—and its popular project, Hacker Highschool.

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I read Gary Hamel's piece, The Facebook Generation vs. the Fortune 500, with great interest. In it, he talks about the tensions that traditional, cubicle-land corporations will likely face as a creative, connected workforce comes on-line. I was particularly interested because, as a member of the higher educational establishment, I'm part of the pipeline, sitting in-between K-12 and the workplace. More importantly, I think that higher education faces many of the same challenges that the Fortune 500 does. So, with that said, I'd like to parallel Gary's piece, edging towards the extreme in my reflection (playing agent provocateur, perhaps) on the tensions between the Facebook generation and higher ed. » Read more

The experience of growing up online will profoundly shape the workplace expectations of “Generation F” – the Facebook Generation. At a minimum, they’ll expect the social environment of work to reflect the social context of the web, rather than as is currently the case, a mid-20th-century Weberian bureaucracy.

If your company hopes to attract the most creative and energetic members of Gen F, it will need to » Read more