Tag givecamp

Entries 2 Total

So Much Slacking, So Little Time

Jul 22, ’09 1:19 PM

I’ve been slacking on the blogging front. Which is a shame, because I’ve been busy doing some really fun things recently. Want to know about one of them? I hope you do, because I’m going to talk about it regardless.

I spent last weekend at the Columbus Give Camp. What was the point of this? Well, the point of Give Camp is for a bunch of geeks to get together and help out various charities.

Over the course of the weekend, I worked on the website for HopeMongers. A lot of the underlying work had been completed, but the public facing portion of the site needed some style and panache to bring it inline with the expectations of Sam Henry, the man behind HopeMongers.

There are a few great things that come out of a weekend like this one.

  • You get a chance to provide much needed help to a charity. Would the work on HopeMongers have been completed if we weren’t involved? Probably, but it would have taken a lot longer.
  • You get to work with a lot of talented people, while you help out a charity. If I were doing this alone, I might not have had as much motivation – I won’t lie about that. But working with other people is great. Especially when you’re all in the same room, sitting around a single table, writing code until the small hours of the morning (or if you’re like me, late hours of the evening). There’s a great collaborative, startup, feel to the whole thing. Ideas bounce around. People help each other solve problems. There’s so much collaboration.
  • You learn a lot about yourself. I learned that I really liked working with Sam on the HopeMongers website. Which in turn made me realize that what I really liked was helping out.

Thanks to everyone involved in the Columbus Give Camp for putting things together and letting me help out by building a database schema for the back end of the site.

A big thanks to Steve Andrews, Chris Funk, Kevin Kuebler, Marwan Saleh, Phil Japiske, Kevin Malone, Carey Payette, and anyone else who worked on the HopeMongers project that I left out. You guys made it a great weekend and I’m glad I had the opportunity to work with all of you.

And a special thanks to Sam Henry for the wonderful project, the great experience, and the opportunity to keep giving back.

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Columbus Give Camp is Just Two Weeks Away

Jul 2, ’09 7:11 AM

The Columbus Give Camp is only two weeks away but it’s still not too late for both charities and volunteers to sign up.

GiveCamp is a weekend-long event where software developers, designers, and database administrators donate their time to create custom software for non-profit organizations. This custom software could be a new website for the nonprofit organization, a small data-collection application to keep track of members, or a application for the Red Cross that automatically emails a blood donor three months after they’ve donated blood to remind them that they are now eligible to donate again. The only limitation is that the project should be scoped to be able to be completed in a weekend.

During GiveCamp, developers are welcome to go home in the evenings or camp out all weekend long. There are usually food and drink provided at the event. There are sometimes even game systems set up for when you and your need a little break! Overall, it’s a great opportunity for people to work together, developing new friendships, and doing something important for their community.

At GiveCamp, there is an expectation of “What Happens at GiveCamp, Stays at GiveCamp”. Therefore, all source code must be turned over to the charities at the end of the weekend (developers cannot ask for payment) and the charities are responsible for maintaining the code moving forward (charities cannot expect the developers to maintain the codebase).

The deadline is July 8th, so get your charity proposals and volunteer submissions in!

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