ABSTRACT
Hacker conventions – like conferences in academic settings – serve the purposes of exchanging knowledge and bringing small and fringe groups of computer aficionados together to find peers, in order to share questions and findings that emerge when playing and working with information and communication systems. A new business has been created around the work of headhunting for software engineering talent under the rubric of the 'hackathon', despite its original connotation of a community-led sprint for developing technologies. A distinctive feature of hacker collectives resides in their effort of self-organisation around publications and gatherings. One of the key insights of recent anthropology of hackers in the Euro-American context is how they represent a distinctive elaboration of liberalism – especially in the domains of free speech and a cultivation of self that is directed towards freedom, autonomy, privacy, and other liberal values.
