A hacky hour is an informal drop in space where people can rock up and get help with specialist tech and coding support. It’s a much more human oriented dynamic than filling out a ticket at a help desk, and in the before times, was often hosted by IT, eResearch or Library teams at a cafe or bar on campus. There’s something about the outdoor (or at the very least, out of the office) vibe and a smattering of laptops emblazoned with software stickers and coffee cups that is a lot less formidable than approaching the IT unit with the ominous hum of servers running in the background. Often software and data skills trainers would run a hacky hour to support their workshop program. Working on a problem in real time is better than a series of back and forth emails or tickets, no?
With the pandemic, hacky hours moved online, into zoom. Some even changed their name, because apparently not everyone wants to be a hacker. Maybe this will change with the new Matrix movie coming out. Also, I don’t even know if people still play hacky sack. It was a popular pastime at universities before smartphones were invented. Like hacky sack, hacky hours are designed for receiving problems and throwing them around until a solution is found. Sometimes the solution is ‘oh! It was the comma all along!’ Other times researchers drop in to say “I did everything the way we did it in the workshop but it is borked. Can you please help?” Some researchers come back regularly, to share progress and things they’ve made since. It’s really good then when they can help new novices.
ResBaz is actually brought to you by people who run hacky hours on the regular, so we wanted to include this in our program. Each afternoon at ResBaz from 3-4pm AEDT, we’ll open the doors to our gather.town space so you can join in, and rock up to any of the hacky hour tables. Gather.town is a very cute interactive platform that looks like you’re in an 8-bit video game, inside a 1980s style conference venue. You can customise your avatar and walk around a map. When you’re near other people, gather turns on your video and mic so you can chat. Like a video game/conference IRL, you can choose where to go, no need for any breakout room choreography! We hope it will be a fun way to end each day, where you can meet other ResBazzers, chat about favourite tools, follow up with an interesting speaker, and ask the friendly support folk to troubleshoot your code.