Advice about forming Hackers Club

Question

I'm thinking of forming a Hackers Club at work. My idea is that we would meet monthly and at each meeting one member would present an interesting hack he had created. (The hacks presented wouldn't necessarily have to be software hacks; they could also be the sort of things you read about in MAKE magazine.) There would also be ANSI standard pizza, veggie pizza, and beer and pop available for socializing afterward. I'm even thinking of calling the club "TMRC" even though it will have nothing to do with model railroads.

Has anyone ever tried doing something like this or have any advice?

Answer 1

We do this at the office. I call it 'Developer Fight Club'

Usually do challenges of varying difficulty and compete against one another.

At the end of it, we go over our solutions, do code-reviews and discussions, and then use either benchmark results or other people as the deciding factor for who wins.

Typically, the loser has to buy lunch for the winner :)

For ideas of things to do, try stuff from Top Coder, programming questions on Stack Overflow, or even simple "crackme" applications available on different programming sites.

The main rules you'll need to adhere to are:

• Make It Fun
• Make It Educational Make
• Make It Fair

Try to rotate the challenges, so either everyone is really good at the subject, equally bad, or at least mix it up often enough that it doesn't favor one person's skillset too much.

Answer 2

If there are women in your 'hacker' group, consider the advice given in the Howto Encourage Women in Linux. Especially the 'meeting places and times' section.

Answer 3

This is a little beyond what you asked, but there is good info on how to plan for hackers and how to resolve issues among members in a polite, hackerly manner.

Overview: http://events.ccc.de/congress/2007/Fahrplan/events/2133.en.html

Videos:
http://chaosradio.ccc.de/23c3_m4v_1500.html
http://chaosradio.ccc.de/24c3_m4v_2133.html

My favorite is the Tuesday Pattern:
If there's a scheduling conflict such that no day of the week is good for everybody, just hold the event on Tuesday. No exceptions! Simple and fair :-)