I was pleased to see that the folks over at IBM recently ran their own Hack Day modeled on the ones we’ve been doing at Yahoo! (which had its own inspirations, of course). IBM is still one of the giants of American business — #10 on the Fortune 500 list — so this is significant.
Kelly Drahzal reports on what happened. Be sure to check out the Hack Day participant map and more on how they are handling their presentations. From what I can tell on Kelly’s blog, she totally nailed the spirit: Looking forward to seeing where this goes next, but my message is … Just DO it. Nice work, Kelly and IBM.
I’m just back from vacation so I don’t have time to write much more now, but in the quiet U.S. holiday period last week while most folks in the states were kicking back on the beach or enjoying backyard BBQs, Yahoo! had two more large-scale Hack Days: one in London for the entire EU (which exceeded all expectations. . . I was in London to see the presentations from all over the European continent) and a second in Bangalore, India. Amazing stuff.
Chad Dickerson's blog 
Thanks for the plug, Chad. Voting continues this week for our first unofficial IBM Hack Day, and the IBM blogosphere is already looking forward to more Hack Day events in the future. IBM’s Hack Day got even more publicity today in a web 2.0 presentation by Carol Jones, IBM Fellow. And it all started when I read about Yahoo’s Hack Day at Yahoo! You should be very proud of what you started, and to see it catch the imagination of developers everywhere, even at the mega-corporation level. It’s gratifying to see that individuals can make a difference. Thanks so much for “lighting the fire”. Hack on!
It seems you’ve started something here. How’s the new job in charge of the developer network going to keep this mentality flowing through Yahoo! and into other companies? I’m sure you’ve got a few things up your sleeve.