Jeff Jaffe’s Blog

During the last week of June, our Open Platform Solutions team celebrated Hack Week – a week dedicated to innovation. What is it, why did we do it, what was the reason for the timing, and what did we learn?

What is it?

During this week, we encouraged the SUSE team to dedicate themselves to innovation. A pet project that they have long wanted to get around to. A curious new area to explore. An idea suggested by a mentor. A launch of what could become a major new initiative.

I have written often about how the open source community is an innovation community. We are continuously innovating. So what does it mean that we dedicated a week (and only one week) to innovation.

This was not a one time event. Hack Week was a launch of a future of continuous innovation. Every employee now sets aside a portion of their time to work on a project of their choice. So Hack Week was more than a week of innovation. By placing a huge spotlight on innovation – and launching a future of continuous innovation – Hack Week re-dedicated our team to a core Novell and SUSE value. Internal surveys about the value of Hack Week told us – we must do it again – SOON.

Why did we do it?

Nat Friedman, our Chief Technology and Strategy Officer for Open Platform Solutions, recognized a problem. We had over-rotated towards the business needs, and moved somewhat from our core value of innovation. Not surprising. With the rapid growth of SUSE Linux Enterprise, with the movement of Linux to new places – with a rapidly expanding desktop and mission critical applications at the server, with an expanding technology agenda including interoperability, with customer demands for support, features, bug fix – it is not surprising that we were focused on business needs.

These business drivers themselves contribute innovation. The world’s most innovative desktop. First to market with Xen virtualization in Linux. Mono. Open Source kernel drivers. AppArmor security. The list goes on and on.

But even the most innovative must stop from time to time to recharge the batteries. That was what Hack Week was all about. Never be reluctant to take out a clean sheet of paper.

And this is appropriate, given the culture of the open source community that we live in. It is all about bottom-up development, decentralized development – with the goal of contributing. We have great developers of code and our aim is to contribute it – ultimately to get it upstream. Hack Week was intended in part to refocus ourselves on that high purpose.

I remember being in Nuremberg when Nat announced it to the team. The excitement was palpable. A return to our core values. To say nothing of having some fun. And I’ve read the survey results after hack week. Near universal praise.

Mechanics

At one level there were no mechanics. Everyone had the right and encouragement to work on their own ideas.

But we also wanted to make it easy for teams to form. And we wanted to provide a menu for those who had not had time to plan prior to Hack Week. And we wanted to provide some context: a set of starter ideas. So we developed an ideas website (idea.opensuse.org). Several weeks before Hack Week, people started to post their ideas, puzzles, challenges, and aspirations. Those that wanted to search for an idea could simply choose one. Those who wanted to work with colleagues that had similar interests – well, it was easy to do.

Timing

This part was easy. We scheduled Hack Week to coincide with the completion of SUSE Linux Enterprise SP 1. We wanted a week that was clear of schedule commitments so that everyone was clear to contribute. And after the completion of a major service pack – on the heels of a major product a year earlier – people needed a break!

Awards

We gave out prizes. Best project. People’s choice. Cross-pollination. QA. Performance improvement. Power management. Best failure. Unix attack. Desktop. openSUSE community building. L3 support. Funniest project. Just looking at the titles of the awards gives a flavor for the diversity, innovation, and focus.

What did we learn?

At the macro level, we reminded ourselves of our core values of innovation, the excitement of what we do, the joy of discovery, and teamwork.

At the micro level, we learned lots of new technologies. People said that in general they got a great deal done; often more than expected. But even those that didn’t felt that the learning was worthwhile.

What should we do differently next time?

For the first time that I can recall, the leading answer was of the form “nothing – it was perfect”. But there were also other helpful thoughts such as earlier notification for better planning and more community involvement.

On behalf of all of the SUSE team: thanks, Nat!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 17th, 2007 at 9:12 am and is filed under General, Linux Operating Systems. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.