Science Hack Day goes global

Science Hack Day announced at OSCON, O’Reilly’s open source convention, a new initiative to encourage the creation of Science Hack Days in cities around the world. The initiative launches with a grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation to Institute For The Future, a non-profit think tank supporting the project led by IFTF Research Affiliate and Science Hack Day SF creator, Ariel Waldman.

Thanks to this generous support, 10 people interested in organizing a Science Hack Day from around the world will be selected to win a scholarship for a trip to Science Hack Day San Francisco, occurring November 12-13, 2011, where they’ll experience first-hand how Science Hack Day works and connect with a global community of organizers. This Science Hack Day Ambassador Program will award individuals who are motivated and planning to organize a Science Hack Day in their city. Open source instructions for how to create a Science Hack Day in your city and how to apply to the Science Hack Day Ambassador Program by August 31, 2011 are available at http://sciencehackday.org.

Science Hack Day is a 48 hour all-night event that brings together designers, developers, scientists and people with good ideas in the same physical space for a brief but  intense period of collaboration, hacking, and building ‘cool stuff’. A hack is a quick solution to a problem – maybe not the most elegant solution, but often the cleverest. On the web, mashups are a common example of hacking: mixing up data from different sources in new and interesting ways. Science Hack Day aims to bridge the gap between the science, technology and design industries to encourage future collaboration, community building and general social awareness of one another. The mission of Science Hack Day is to get excited and make things with science.

“Science should be disruptively accessible,” said Waldman. “Science Hack Day empowers people from a variety of different backgrounds to explore, participate in, and build new ways of interacting with and contributing to science.”