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There isn’t too much I can add to Kevin Anderson’s extensive coverage of Guardian Hack Day 2 [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6]. But here are a couple of things…

First, huge congratulations to Matt McAlister and the whole organising team. Hack Day 1 set the bar pretty high, but the team managed to meet that, if not surpass it.

Second, a terrific change from the last one was that so many people seemed to be sharing skills and ideas  across organisations. People from Tinker.it, the BBC, Inkling, Google, Talis, Omniture, Rabbit, Guardian and elsewhere all mixed it up to produce some really innovative stuff. Added to this, there was a healthy number of people who don’t claim to be programmers creating some very interesting hacks, thanks in part to Simon Willison’s list of Hack Day tools for non-developers.

So among other things we got a tracker of the most controversial articles, a page of search terms that people are using to find guardian.co.uk — live — a social network for dead people, and much, much more.

The photo here shows Matt under the gaze of the Guardian’s inspirational editor CP Scott — or rather a bust of him. I’ve put this photo and others in a Flickr photo pool. If you were there, please feel free to contribute.

Yesterday we launched the Guardian Open Platform, incorporating the Content API and the Data Store. A lot’s been said already about this — and more will be said — so I will add only a few words of acknowledgement. Many have pointed out (Tom Watson, Jeff Jarvis, ReadWriteWeb, Fast Company and others) that it’s a serious move by the company itself. So I really want to spend a moment to reflect on what that really means.

It can really be best captured by the questions asked by the crowd at the launch event: What if other news organisations want to reuse your journalism? Will the ad network really work? Do the numbers add up? These and other questions were asked at the time and were asked inside the organisation in the months leading up to the launch. The questions span journalism, advertising, finance, technology, marketing, strategy, legal and, of course, technology. These were addressed by real people in real departments who sat down together and worked together. They worked to shape the Open Platform to make sure that it is absolutely right thing to do, from so many points of view.

Matt McAlister brought all the strands together, and must be credited for nurturing and co-ordinating such a major move. But there’s also huge credit to be given to so many individuals within so many Guardian departments who made sure it was a unified, coherent and successful whole. This is a major corporate achievement, but in so many ways a corporation is just another name for individuals working together.

…which are a top navigation level of guardian.co.uk. However the navigational structure was designed to be quite fluid, and the concept of a zone is really more of an internal reference point than a phrase that’s intended to be used by our site’s users.

The ebb and flow of the online media marketplace meant that while we were working on R2 Times Online in the UK launched a redesign of their own. At the time I was interested to read an interview with their Information Architect who said that they had constructed a three-level navigation hierarchy. For guardian.co.uk we had considered and rejected implementing such an explicit scheme for three primary reasons.

First we recognise that the breadth of our content wasn’t equal across all subjects — we have many more journalists working on news stories than travel stories, for example, so a second-level of navigation under news might have a couple of dozen subjects, which is impossible to display conveniently on a navbar. Second not all subjects break down neatly into three levels — some topics have more depth and complexity than others. Third, Guardian values mean that certain subjects need to be given more prominence than a formal encyclopaedic breakdown allows — for example, in any formal scheme environmental issues would be part of the news or the science section, but the reality is that our planet’s environmental state is far too important to relegate to anything but the highest level.

So R2 was designed to allow fluidity and flexibility in our navigation, and we created words to describe its different aspects. A zone is one of the top-level categories that appear along the top navigation bar: News, Sport, Comment, Culture, etc. At the bottom level of categorisation are very specific subjects such as interest rates, war crimes, Kate Moss and thousands of others. If you’re reading about one of these subjects it doesn’t matter how many levels deep you might be as long as there’s some clear signposting to find your way to your next point of interest. The navigation should give you some kind of orientation, and importantly act as a guide to jumping off to similar subjects or to begin a new journey elsewhere entirely. But exposing any internal classification system is less important. R2 has given us a system that separates the visual navigation from the way content is organised internally.