Bikers as Alpha Geeks

James Governor of RedMonk wrote in email: "I couldn't help but read this and think hell's angels = foo." (The article he points to describes how Harley Davidson reinvigorated their brand by embracing the outlaw bikers who at one point seemed to be ruining the market for them.)
 

James is completely right on. Hackers are the hells angels of the computer industry -- and also its salvation. Every time the industry gets stuck, it's the hackers who show the way forward. Think: the homebrew computer club and the PC revolution; the explosive growth of the early web from the fringes to the mainstream; the open source revolution; and more recently, the mashup phenomenon and the rise of Web 2.0.

The "alpha geeks" and FOOs are also the heart of O'Reilly's brand. As we reach out to different audiences and topics, we do our best to remember that, and to tell a story about how our core value proposition is in our ability to spot those people and technologies that are going to turn things upside down. This is our mission: Changing the world by spreading the knowledge of innovators. And in 2002, after the dotcom bust, we made it a goal to reinvigorate the industry by helping pour some fuel on this bottom-up fire, and help the industry give more credit to the people who don't have business plans, but just want to have fun.

This was the point of our first conference. I started the Perl Conference in 1997 after realizing how the suits totally missed Perl, despite the fact that the second edition of Programming Perl was the top computer book of 1996. Someone needed to make some noise! We went on from there to make noise about open source in general, about P2P as a forerunner of the new possibilities of the internet as a platform, eventually leading to what we now call Web 2.0. (Or maybe we should call it W3b 2.0.)

But in recent years, we've made a more explicit play to make hacking more respectable. Our Hacks series makes the case that hacking is not cracking. And in our conferences, we've made a more conscious effort to reach out to the business community with the message that they ought to pay attention to the hackers. And sometimes, it's hard to bridge the two communities.

Nat Torkington made this point in a recent posting to the geowanking mailing list about our upcoming Where 2.0 conference, discussing how we are trying to straddle both the hacker and business communities with the conference:

We were chasing a rapidly developing mashup world and trying to figure out how to do a Big Budget Conference with business people and the technologists we know and love. We started off thinking "business people want business wank", but there are dozens of conferences offering business wank and everyone's sick of it. Business people turned out to really like meeting the people who were turning things upside down....
 

So I want to show the projects that are hurting the old way of doing things, have some people talk about how things are changing (just to spell it out), and then leave it to the audience to figure out where to make the money, or even whether there is money to be made. I was talking with Chris Holmes tonight and in conversation came upon that formulation: we'll show you how the world's changing, you figure out for yourself where the money is."

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