The website (there’s always a website) dedicated to cataloguing the pranks is actually called the Hack Gallery (hacks.mit.edu). The list of hacks includes creative endeavours such as lining a hall with invading green army men, installing a lunar module on top of the Great Dome, setting up a giant statue of Athena on a main lawn, and my personal fave, hanging mannequins on high wires and trapezes from a ceiling along with long flowing ribbons,to turn a lobby into a circus.

Along these lines, I found a fantastic line in the Wikipedia definition of “hacker”:”Hacking entails some form of excellence, for example exploring the limits of what is possible, thereby doing something exciting and meaningful. Activities of playful cleverness can be said to have “hack value.”

Now within the mainstream, the term has been appropriated to describe people who hold these same values and do computer programming. But the principles of creativity and cleverness still underlie the activity, and the fun may be more intrinsic than obvious to us the outside observer. But it’s still there.

So adopting a hacking mindset then means translating this clever, ethical, enjoyable, excellence-seeking behaviour to our everyday lives. See? Hacking is a mindset, not a skillset.

When you seek, in your everyday lives, to deliberately find opportunities to be clever, ethical, to enjoy what you are doing, to seek excellence, you are hacking. Now the key here is that this behaviour is deliberate. Not a happy accident. If you aren’t acting this way deliberately, then we need to change your thinking and behaviour a little bit in order to make this your default MO.

I recently wrote about the science of behaviour change in a post on New Year’s resolutions. Behavioural science has indicated that in order to effect behaviour change, you need to break things down into small tasks. Successfully completing tiny tasks is a necessary step in making new behaviours stick. With that in mind (and I’ve probably oversimplified things), I’ve boiled hacking down to 5 principles that you can keep in mind, and incorporate into your day to day thinking.

The Principles of The Hacking Mindset (according to spydergrrl)

Yeah, these should probably always have the “according to spydergrrl” qualifier since I’m sure that there would be many people (hackers and crackers alike) with their own opinions, happy to jump on the Interwebs and tell my I am wrong 🙂

Here we go.

1. Challenge accepted! (Barriers are welcomed)

This is part of the “clever” component to hacking: accepting barriers as sources of motivation in their own right, motivating you to find a solution to break through them; the feeling of accomplishment at the end being its own reward.

Take for example the origins of crowdfunding,especially through sites like Quirky, Kickstarter, Indiegogo. A lot of the projects funded through these sites wouldn’t necessarily get backing by venture capitalists or even banks in order to become a reality. Going directly to consumers to get what essentially amounts to pre-purchases of products and services is a fantastic way to hack the economic system and traditional business models.

In 2002, one of the founders of Indiegogo co-produced a play. It was popular with audiences but not exactly self-funding so they decided to look at other ways to raise investment capital. Indiegogo was born and launched at Sundance in 2008, initially geared to raising money to fund films. It’s evolved over the past 5 years to support all sorts of projects: even local communications company MediaStyle is using it to crowdsource funding for a new collaborative event space in their building.

Kickstarter is a bit different because people don’t “invest” in Kickstarter projects to make money. They “back” projects in exchange for a tangible good or experience. One example is local tech company teknision who used it to fund and launch their Chameleon desktop app for Android.

Now let’s think about you and a common barrier you might face at work. At some point in your career (or maybe your whole career) you’ve likely been told that there are no or very little funds for training. And let’s assume that you don’t have the wallet to fund your own training. So how do you creatively make up your own training? Thankfully there are plenty of other people who believe in the freedom of information which means you can access free webinars, online articles, and library books. You can find or build a network of people who have the skills you need: joining meetups, social networking, etc. And as you learn, you can find speaking opportunities to test your ideas and your learning.

That’s one way. But you could also jump right into projects that will stretch your skills and knowledge: At work, advocate for projects you think are important and if you don’t get approval, do them anyway! Partner with people in your network to grow your skills, get experience in a new field. Can’t do what you want at work/ in your job? Find a pro bono project that will let you do what you love. (Or even maintain skills that you fear you might lose because you’re not using them in your current job.) Hacking your training can eventually lead you to hacking your career.

Phew. This hacking stuff is a lot of work. Ok, let’s step back and start a little smaller.

You get home from work, (stay with me), you get home from work, look up the recipe you want to make tonight and notice you have all the wrong ingredients. But if you throw away the recipe and modify your expectations to make something with what you had, you’ll realize that you had all the right ingredients all along. Just the wrong recipe. Those are the small tasks I was talking about; tiny wins that can help you make hacking your default behaviour.

A barrier might only exist due to a perception issue: do you have the wrong tools or do you have the right tools but are looking at the problem from a particular perspective which is limiting your ability to think beyond it? Which brings me to my next principle…

2. Blow away the box. Look for unexpected ways to make something better.

You’ve probably heard the adage: if you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Need proof? Watch a kid walk around the house with a toy hammer. You know it’s true. The problem as adults is that we become too practical and start to limit our thinking: only nails look like nails. Sometimes, finding the fun or creative way to approach to something, means that we need to step back to the place where everything looked like a nail.

Take social media, for example. If you’ve ever had to explain to someone that Twitter is not millions of people posting their lunch, and that there is a lot to gain from investing a little bit of time each day in reading blogs or answering questions on Quora, then you know exactly what I am talking about. Those people think nails are nails: networking happens at formal corporate events, training takes place in boardrooms and classrooms, and it is necessary to respect the hierarchical chain of command. Riiight.

But you know that everything is a nail. Which is why you follow hundreds if not thousands of thought leaders on Twitter. You’ve chatted with them in the comments section of their blogs. You’ve rubbed elbows with them (or *gasp* senior executives) at informal, non-work-related networking events (aka meetups). Chances are, you will probably skip a couple of rungs on your way up the ladder.

You know that you will find out much more in 5 minutes on Twitter first thing in the morning than by spending an hour reading one newspaper or magazine. You know how to Google (and how to teach others by sending them links to “Let Me Google That For You”). You have figured out how to get value, how to find what you need out of a noisy, messy system where others only see chaos. See, you’re already hacking.

Now, going beyond thinking outside the box, and actually blowing away the box can be difficult because it requires you to know who you are. That means not defining yourself by how others define you. Like Ada Lovelace,the first reknown woman mathematician and computing specialist, back in the 1800s, when men were men and women were at home.

Hacking your approach, blowing away the box means not allowing your thinking to be limited by the rules and restrictions that others put up around you.It means questioning your own assumptions of the world and not letting yourself be contradicted by the opinions of others.It means being confident enough to take a risk, and trusting your gut especially when it seems to have more conviction than your mind does. It means seeing the matrix.

For the most part, it may mean testing out assumptions out on a limb, but if you have built that network, if you have crowdsourced your ideas, then chances are you won’t be alone when it’s time to challenge traditional approaches. And that’s another great thing about hacking:hackers have each other’s back.

3. Bring your friends. Unique perspectives create more robust solutions.

A colleague of mine recently tweeted that “we cannot solve a complex problem with a solution from a single discipline of study #justsaying” — Ralph Mercer (@ralphmercer) December 4, 2012. Which is one of the reasons why I love hackfests. Now, I don’t consider myself a coder. I think of my abilities in HTML, JavaScript and CSS as coding-light. So when someone suggested I attend a hackfest, I thought that was probably one of the most intimidating ideas ever. (Well, until I got invited to speak at Girl Geek Dinner 😉

And then I worked as a business analyst in R&D, collaborating with technical architects and developers, whiteboarding solutions and brainstorming development approaches. And I realized that going to a hackfest would be no different. As I wrote late last year about LearnHack YOW, hosted by OpenData Ottawa, it takes all kinds to come up with a solution. You need experienced developers, analysts, user experience types and especially users. Non-hackers are as important to a good hackfest as hackers are… how else will you know if your solution will be useful and usable outside of the hackfest bubble?

Outside of the development space, there are plenty of examples of collaborative solution building, or as we now refer to it: crowdsourcing. The first time I came across it was back in the mid-2000s with the Dell Social Innovation Challenge. This was a contest open to post-secondary students across the entire globe, in which they submitted ideas for social change. They posted them to an interactive site, and the general public could vote them up or down. The prize was a scholarship, and the potential to work on their idea.

More recently, there was the public consultation on the Icelandic constitution. If you didn’t check it out, it was posted on a wiki, so anyone could log in and make changes. All of the changes were recorded in the history, so it was possible to sift through the evolution of the document over time (and revert to a previous version if it got vandalized).

The MIT hackers understood the importance of being a part of something bigger than yourself. It’s why people join social groups, volunteer, even play massively multiplayer online role playing games like World of Warcraft or Halo. It’s even why people play Farmville and tend to each other’s crops.

And you? If you need to work through a question or an idea, if you need to whiteboard an issue, who do you turn to? Have you built up a network of resources that you can tap when you need help? Maybe you have, and you call on subject matter experts for help with work, with your blog, with technical knowledge. But what about calling on someone who has absolutely nothing to do with the project/ department? No experience or subject matter expertise at all? Would you ask your mom for help on a work issue? Probably not.

Maybe your question seems technical but actually has an interpersonal angle you just aren’t noticing. Maybe your personality conflict has an underlying technical issue. You can hack your own thinking by finding a mentor or a trusted advisor who will tell you the truth at all times. Or by developing a network of open-minded individuals with varying backgrounds and expertise who can offer you a fresh perspective when you need it.

In the same way that a hackfest needs to be multidisciplinary and reach across all sorts of stakeholder groups to be the most effective, maybe you should reconsider your network and include people who can bring in completely new perspectives, and are more than happy to share their knowledge to help you evolve your thinking. Which brings me to point #4…

4. Give it away now. Information and knowledge should be shared openly, freely.

Sharing information empowers others to change the world. Well, at least their part of the world. Now I may have a bit more of an extreme view of these things than the average person, but I believe that information deserves to be free; research, knowledge, history, these are all beneficial to all of us. And hoarding them or locking them down in the name of intellectual property or profit is counter-intuitive to innovation.

Anyone who followed the news about the suicide of Aaron Swartz will know that there is an entire movement of people who not only believe in the freedom of information, but will actually crack networks with the intent of liberating it. I’m not suggesting that you go dark and start breaking into networks to free information that’s not yours.  I’m suggesting that you look at your own knowledge and skills and consider what you can share in the spirit of collboration and openness.

Now you might not be able to decide what to do with the information or data that you work with if you’re employed by someone else, so how can you infuse this giving nature into your own life? By giving away your knowledge: post it, assign a creative commons license, do pro bono work, give away your expertise.

If you’ve never used a creative commons license, it’s like a copyright on intellectual property that allows others to build on your content as long as they reference you. There are several tiers of licenses that can apply to any IP such as images, content, and media. There are even sites like ccMixter where people will post music for re-use (you will often hear CBC mention creative commons music credits). You might have even used Wikicommons (with full attribution, of course), which is a site where people will share their media for re-use.

But you can also license content on your own site. For example, when I post my presentations, I do so with a Creative Commons attribution. I post my full scripts and slides, and open them up so that anyone else can re-use or riff on them at their leisure. The license permits them to use it and re-use it, as long as they credit me for the original content.

You can also look at other community activities that foster information sharing, some easier than others: I mentioned pro bono earlier as a great way to hack your training, so in fact there are two benefits: your client benefits from work they likely could not otherwise afford, and you get to hone some skills. (Don’t forget to put it on your resume)

You might also consider a for-donation project, where you donate the proceeds. One that you might have heard of (or even been part of) is the 100 Strangers Project by Kim Usan. She took photos of 100 strangers over the course of a year, blogged their stories and then did an art show and sold a coffee table book. All the proceeds went to a charity that was near and dear to her heart.

Closer to home, and more manageable on a day-to-day basis, you can contribute to open source and open data projects,contributing to community-knowledge wikis like wikipedia or those for makers or even Lego lovers, openly blogging on your areas of expertise, organize a community learning event or unconference,teach a class, donate some time to your kid’s school to teach them something in your area of expertise because we need to…

5. Pay it forward. Teach the next generation to think like a hacker.

Hubby and I are raising a hacker. The running joke in our house is that The Dude will get arrested for hacking into some website when he’s 17 and he’ll tell the police that his mom taught him how to hack. But that’s not the type of hacking we’re teaching him. In fact, he barely uses a computer at home. We’re teaching him to hack his thinking, to think like a hacker to solve problems.

The whole idea of teaching him to hack actually started last Christmas. I found a set of instructions to build a Star Wars Lego DeathStar tree ornament. Hubby and the Dude took a look at the instructions and decided that they didn’t have the right pieces to build it. We have 10,000 pieces of Lego. And this ornament used about 100. So, I got a bit frustrated when I heard this. They were really limiting their thinking.

So I asked the Dude if he knew what hacking was, and told him that we were going to hack the Lego. I made him think up all sorts of combinations to substitute the pieces we didn’t have. I made him figure out how we could rework the instructions to suit the pieces we could find in his Lego bin. He was so proud when we finished building it. He even started to refer to himself as a hacker. These days, he knows exactly what I mean when he brings me a problem and I tell him to “hack it”. He knows that means to look at the problem again and to reimagine the solution in a new way.

Kids have the most unique perspectives; their thinking is not limited as is ours, they are very perceptive. Some of their ideas are crazy but given a real problem, they will often come up with very real solutions. The Dude begged me to bring him to a hackfest a couple of months ago and it was one of the most fun activities we’ve done together.

I explained all of the data sets to him in simple terms and had him design his own app concept on paper. He didn’t draw it, but wrote down the functions and features that it would have. It might have been easier for him to just draw a picture but by making him think about the functionality, he had to spend a little more time thinking from the user’s perspective and understanding what they would want out of it. And it got me thinking about hackfests in schools. It would be so easy to bring a simple hackfest into the classroom and have kids make up their own apps. Any time it’s possible to demonstrate the real-life applicability of their studies, kids seem to get more engaged in their learning.

But teaching a hacker, fostering hacking in the next generation doesn’t have to be so formal. It can start small with game or toy hacking, in our case, Lego hacking. We’ll often check out Brickipedia (yes, a Lego wiki!) for ideas and instructions for sets we don’t own. We make him Google ideas, science experiments and definitions when he has questions. We seek out opportunities to turn questions into opportunities for problem solving and hacking.

It’s important to teach kids to hack and actually call it that; to explain to them the importance of reinventing problems, working around constraints, and modding whatever they’ve been given.At home, at school, when our kids says something is impossible, we make it a priority to prove them wrong, to expand their thinking. These are skills that can serve them their entire lives. And it starts with us modeling the behaviour, and hacking ourselves.

There you go. The Principles of The Hacking Mindset (according to spydergrrl)
1. Challenge accepted! (Barriers are welcomed)
2. Blow away the box. Look for unexpected ways to make something better.
3. Bring your friends. Unique perspectives create more robust solutions.
4. Give it away now. Information and knowledge should be shared openly, freely.
5. Pay it forward. Teach the next generation to think like a hacker.

Based on the original definition of hacking, these are 5 principles that you can use to rethink situations, re-evaluate problems, and hack everything you do.So, if hacking is the application of hacking principles to everyday life, then I’ll ask again, how many of you would be willing to call yourselves hackers?