Social Hacking

It is not advisable to prod a topic that one is not completely sure of - But, to overlook this well-accepted wisdom has been one of my characteristics; It stems from the belief that an idiotic thought or question from a "newbie" might spur some useful,concrete activity in the minds of the "experts".

With the above excuse, I proceed to talk about what i would like to call as Social Hacking (unfortunately, the same term is used elsewhere to mean something different - some pages that google returns for social hacking/hackers are not connected to what i propound in this blog).

I describe social hacking as using one's skill and abilities to the betterment of the society with the hacker's attitude.

Let me give an (hypothetical) example of what I mean: you find your cafeteria to be inefficient, they use systems that require unnecessarily long queues which everyone tolerates with irritation. You device a method wherein the waiting time is reduced considerably - for example, majority of the customers come only to buy coke from the cafeteria, so your solution is that having a sperate counter just for coke will reduce the average waiting time - moreover, it is cost-effective to implement too!

Whatever we do in our daily lives as professional workers is to put our skills to use so that we are of some use to our society- for which you get paid.

But, a social hacker actively tries to solve real-world societal problems without monetary intentions- He just loves to solve problems.

Teaching a bunch of kids how to do maths is one way of Social Hacking too (According to me).

One should realize that:
* Social Hacking is not a form of charitable work.
* It is just using your skill to solve societal problems.

Putting it very simply, if you find a barbed wire on the Highway, and you stop your car to remove it, you have kinda started to hack the society.

statutory warning - I am not a well-known/self-proclamied hacker, my understanding of the concept of hacking stems from reading the works of the masters. I might have misunderstood them.