My philosophy regarding the benefits of hacking 1

When you understand one thing through and through, you understand everything. cc-by lemasney

First, a personal definition of hacking:

Context, connotations, and ethics in hacking:

The reason that ‘black hat’ hackers (generally called hackers by media and crackers by benevolent hackers) are called hackers is because they understand the systems that they are hacking to the degree that they can manipulate the flaws of that system, typically for self-benefit. Therein lies the ethical issue.

‘White hat‘ hackers understand a system more fully so that they can make it better, even if that means doing something unintentional as far as the system was designed. Hacking can be applied to any expertise, problem, or environment, such as food and cooking, architecture and building, or the internet and development. If you’ve ever made leftovers into a stir fry, or turned a piece of writing paper into an airplane, you were hacking at a basic level, as the original intent was different in the designs of those examples.

On ethical civic hacking:

By applying the art of hacking to civic environs and activities, you have the potential to improve the everyday lives of a community. It works best when the community is involved: problems are collaboratively unearthed, design thinking is collaboratively applied, and hacking is performed collaboratively. Community hackathons are incubators for this kind of process. It’s the best work that we can do today as citizens, in my opinion, to avoid stagnant, consumerist-oriented, closed box solutions.

To this end, LeMasney Consulting is a partner with Code for Princeton, a local branch of Code for America. LeMasney Consulting supports and practices ethical hacking. Find out more about Code for Princeton on their Meetup page at http://www.meetup.com/codeforprinceton/. The following photos were taken by Claire Balani, the social media lead for @codeforprinceton

@codeforprinceton – lemasney

@codeforprinceton – lemasney

This content is published under the Attribution 3.0 Unported license.