Comment by hawkharris | Hacker News Reader

Comment by hawkharris | Hacker News Reader

Words are easier once you recognize that the official title of a person, product or organization actually communicates very little to people outside of the organization.

Working in communications, I've seen many instances of groups using acronyms and catchy titles to brand (or rebrand) themselves. For example:

- After much deliberation, a health care center decided to call its members "HARP," which stood for Health Advocacy Resource Personnel, to emphasize that they were focusing on preventative care.

- A law enforcement unit changing a job title from Community Outreach Officer to Street Worker in an effort to show that they were concentrating on gangs in high-crime neighborhoods.

Not surprisingly, no one outside of health care ever found out what "HARP" meant. And former gang members didn't build relationships with the police because some of them were called Street Workers.

My point is this: changing a title can entice someone to learn more about your organization and its members, but the title itself cannot - and will not - communicate all the nuances of a position. That's the responsibility of a messaging campaign.

I like that Hacker School has distilled the nuances of its members' roles into a blog post. The next step should be to develop focused messages that paint a picture of these students / hackers / developers / HackerSchoolers and what makes them unique.

OP here. After reading through the reactions to this post, I think the biggest thing I missed is explaining why we need a word at all.

The primary reason to have a word is that we can have something to refer to ourselves (where "we" are members of the Hacker School community). I think most communities come up with words to refer to their members. It certainly happened in ours: there are a handful of words that people at Hacker School use to refer to themselves and new ones come up regularly.[^1]

The things to consider when figuring out what to call someone who does Hacker School is not what the outside world will think, but whether people who do Hacker School will feel comfortable wanting to use the word to describe themselves and whether we would be alienating anyone who would otherwise enjoy coming to Hacker School.

[^1]. The question of how much we as facilitators should try to influence that process is probably out of scope for this discussion. Let's just assume we've decided that we want to have some input. I can't resist footnotes, even in comments. Yeesh.

>whether people who do Hacker School will feel comfortable wanting to use the word to describe themselves

>and whether we would be alienating anyone who would otherwise enjoy coming to Hacker School.

Maybe you just need a big thesaurus and someone who has a good feeling for the political atmosphere of your group.

I could have sworn that something was in Hacker School's explicit social rules that specifically says to beware of solutions that contain the word "just." Turns out there's not, but: when you phrase things that way, you imply that a person is puzzled over something trivial.

Nope. Words are hard.

I didn't imply that it would be easy to understand the political atmosphere of the group, or that finding the words would be easy. From a different perspective it is essentially the same thing as asking everyone with a formal/informal survey, or observing the common phrases used. It could be done many different ways.

Random question: why is there a random-length HTML comment in your blog post?

https://github.com/meldium/breach-mitigation-rails

One alternative to existing words, and inventing completely new words, is to combine elements of existing words to create a new, unique, yet familiar sounding word. For example, Intel called their 586 chip a Pentium -- Penti being the prefix for 5. So, how about something like Hackranaut, which would imply someone exploring the Hacking arena?

I once built a community on Facebook titled "\(n_n)/". The idea was to have thoughtful, philosophical discussions, but I didn't want to name it "Philosophy Group" or whatever because that sounded pretentious. We'd call ourselves "n_n'ers" or "nners"- which, of course, can't really be pronounced. In person, we'd say "I met her through 'N'."

I think this is one of those things where something will emerge out of necessity, and it'll just stick, and a bottom-up approach will probably be best. Let people figure out their own "desire paths" to what they want to be called. If communication is necessary, people will find a way.

I totally agree with this. Knowing absolutely nothing about Hacker School, it was a great surprise to me that their customers aren't students and that they are uncomfortable with calling themselves a school in the first place.

The thing is, I was very comfortable in my ignorance, because "Hacker School" has an extremely strong connotation that I didn't really have any interest in, and so I didn't go and look to their webpage to find that they're actually a "writers' retreat for programmers" -- which sounds MUCH more intriguing to me!

If they had instead gone with some acronym or made-up word or something to which I can't immediately assign a definition, I'd have taken the time to learn.

You are describing positions of leadership -- a leader doesn't need to communicate downwards (with their title) to the street gangs or to the patients. They are going to lead those people, so it is unnecessary.

The people from hacker school are going to be lead, and mostly not hired straight into a position of leadership, so it is necessary to communicate to the leaders-to-be a title which communicates well what that person has been up to, because everything that person does will be taken into account by that leader-to-be, and more closely inspected than the gang member or patient will inspect the title of the person helping them.

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