[davidbalbert]

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.

[derekp7]

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?

[visakanv]

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.

[read]

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

[drewbug]

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

[funthree]

>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]

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.

[funthree]

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.