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.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
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.
"NY Hacker Apprenticeship w/ a young female hacker as the mascot" would essentially flip it around, where the Apprenticeship term is used (its an old world male symbol, lets get over the passive aggressiveness) and a modern symbol of equality is used (a female hacker, yes there is political tension over this as we all know, lets get over the passive-aggressiveness)
Yes it was light-hearted because that is essentially two politically provoking things from the wrong vantage point; but sometimes two things which are politically diverging can cancel each other out with the right dose of comedy, fun, and respect.
One could take it plenty of other directions, but I thought it would be cool. Maybe "Hacker School" wants to avoid the political scene altogether out of self preservation, maybe they'll downvote me and take my ideas anyways, or maybe they'll just downvote me and dislike me, who knows?
I have nothing against any person or group, and I respect everyone equally. Cheers.
edit: The real question is, how do you get this far without knowing you are running an Apprenticeship? https://www.hackerschool.com/about
(For geeky reference: either presumably inspired the Jedi/Padawan structure.)
Per the point you were making in your essay, though, he does this because most of his students are post-docs and (1) they understand what a "fellowship" is and (2) do not necessarily want to be a "student" again. To a postdoc, especially, student implies having to pay for it.
The other folks upthread are sort of missing the point, honestly, because when it comes to a word like "student," it touches on issues of identity and association. When someone (e.g., a friend) asks your students, "What are you doing?" they're going to respond with, "Oh, I'm an X at Hacker School."
You want X to be something the students feel comfortable saying to friends, families, and co-workers. Whether "fellow" is too pretentious or not depends on who your students are and who they'll be saying "I'm an X" to.
Participants
Attendees
Customers
As for the school thing, if what you think you're running is a school, call it a school. Words aren't hard, marketing is hard.
I'm attending Hacker School. A friend I haven't seen in a few months comes up and asks, "So, what are you doing these days?" I respond with something like
Oh, I'm an X at Hacker School
Oh, I'm Y-ing at Hacker School
They might say "I'm attending Hacker School," but that immediately implies that one is a student, i.e., you'd expect their friend to respond, "Oh, cool! What's it like being a student there?" Or if said friend were to ask, "Ah, so you're a student there?" I'd of course reply affirmatively. If they seemed open to it I might elaborate on how being a student at Hacker School isn't like being a student as they think of it.
Perhaps one way to think of it is this: by giving the students at Hacker School a way to refer to themselves, Hacker School is helping them tell a more compelling story to both themselves and those people who care about them.
[1]: You might disagree, I suppose, but I'm not going to argue the point. :)
[2]: Also, the students at Hacker School are not their customers. Hacker School is free for all students and they (presumably) make money through job referrals. This means those companies are their customers, not the students.
---I'm a programmer at "hacker school"
---Cool, what's "hacker school?"
You probably already have a laboratory running natural experiments in this area: the conversations of the people in your groups. If they lack official language for what they're doing, they have no choice but to make something up. Those can be good creative conditions. If I were you, I might try to get them to tell me what the names are, by listening closely to the words they use in conversation and to which formulations feel easiest and most alive. This often works better when people aren't consciously trying to come up with names but do it spontaneously when talking about something else.
By the way, maybe you shouldn't be down on "school" for what you're doing. It's true that people have a lot of preconceptions about school. But it's also true that your usage is historically deep. "School" didn't originally mean "child processing factory" or whatever it is now. Here's what Etymonline has for it [1]:
"place of instruction," Old English scol, from Latin schola "intermission of work, leisure for learning; learned conversation, debate; lecture; meeting place for teachers and students, place of instruction; disciples of a teacher, body of followers, sect," from Greek skhole "spare time, leisure, rest ease; idleness; that in which leisure is employed; learned discussion;"
That seems pretty close to what you're doing. Historical meanings often have resonance and sometimes make comebacks. I wouldn't relinquish this one if I were you. Imagine if you are part of a resurgence of the original meaning of schools. How cool would that be?!
[1] http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=school
p.s. You might consider "mentor" for what your web site calls "resident", and then "resident" instead of "student"...I think "resident" could go either way.
When I read your post, I thought about Resident Advisors in college and it seemed like an apt comparison. When I was an RA, I wouldn't say that my residents were my students. They learned things from me, but I also learned things from them too. I had some wisdom, but it didn't really come from a place of power. We were mostly peers, just I had the keys to their rooms when they were locked out and mediated disputes.
I feel like you should call your current residents advisors and your participants residents;residents of the hacker school
It will help out others to decide where to attend and offer some advice from an insider's perspective on these types of schools.