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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 orga

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.

funthree 13y ago
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.
toki5 13y ago
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.
davidbalbert 13y ago
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.
- funthree 13y ago
  >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.
  - misuba 13y ago
    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.
    - deleted 13y ago
      [deleted]
    - funthree 13y ago
      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.

funthree 13y ago

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.

toki5 13y ago

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.

davidbalbert 13y ago

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.

funthree 13y ago
>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.
- misuba 13y ago
  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.
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
  - funthree 13y ago
    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.