TEA Time: New England GiveCamp 2012 Recap
Last weekend I was in Cambridge, Mass. for New England GiveCamp 2012, the third of annual meet-ups that match technical and design people with nonprofit organizations that need their help.
The Charles River Esplanade is on the left. Hatch Memorial Shell and Teddy Ebersol's Red Sox Fields are in the foreground.
My cause was The Esplanade Association, an organization that cares for the Charles River Esplanade Park.
The Charles River Esplanade Park is the Boston-side green space along the river, from the Museum of Science to the Boston University Bridge. While it’s owned and managed by the state of Massachusetts, TEA (which has to be the coolest acronym possible for a Boston-based group) exists to organize people to help protect and care for the park.
Much of their work involves organizing volunteers to clean up the park several times each year. TEA also holds a number of programs in the park — yoga, Zumba, dances and the like — and runs several fund raising projects.
They came to GiveCamp, initially, looking for a way to better coordinate singing up groups and individuals for cleanup days.
Continue reading: TEA Time: New England GiveCamp 2012 Recap »
Review: Free: The Future of a Radical Price
Free: The Future of a Radical Price by Chris Anderson
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
Reading Free: The Future of a Radical Price reminded me, in many ways, of The Grand Design.
To understand the universe on the quantum level, you have to embrace understandings and facts that seem ludicrous at human scales. That is, that we have free will; that things cannot be in the same place at the same time; that time progresses at one speed and forward only, are all convenient and explicit truths for our day-to-day existence. But at the subatomic level, that’s not how things work; not at all.
Anderson’s arguments about Free — that is, gratis and libre — are presented in the same sense, if not quite as well or explicitly.
Free does a fine job of explaining the mechanics of how things can be free on the Web: namely, per-unit / per-user costs are so low, they might as well be considered nothing.
He also does a good job of explaining the obvious money-making models applied successfully so far: advertising, freemium (basic service is free; premium service costs money) and non-monetary / indirect recompense, such as an increase in reputation / marketing of ancillary products, such as concerts and merchandise for musicians or speaking engagements and consultations for professionals.
Continue reading: Review: Free: The Future of a Radical Price »
New England GiveCamp 2011: What A Weekend!
Last weekend was New England GiveCamp 2011, in which 100+ developers, designers and other volunteers gathered to donate time and skills to some 30 charities who needed IT help.
This year, I was project lead for Alex’s Team Foundation, based in Andover, Mass. Our team was Saurabh Moondhra and William Wade, both experienced ASP.NET developers.
Alex’s Team Foundation, named after 16-year-old Alex Miliotis, who passed away from leukemia in 2002, raises money to support nurses and other oncology professionals, and supports youth sports. The foundation is largely the labors of Patti Rae Miliotis, Alex’s mother, and a handful of reliable volunteers. Like every small nonprofit, Alex’s Team doesn’t have a lot of money.
From the right to left: William Wade, Doug Vanderweide, Saurabh Moondhra and Patti Rae Miliotis of Alex's Team Foundation. The lady with her feet up is Deanna Lohnes, who worked on another project; the woman in green, whose name I do not know, was her charity's contact person.
Like every other leader of a small nonprofit, Patti is pulled in a lot of different directions and has all she can do to keep track of the people with whom she comes in contact, nonetheless all the donations she gets. Patti also hosts a few events every year. She basically needs a way to keep track of who attends those events or otherwise supports her organization, and to mail merge thank-you notes.
So that was the project I led this weekend: Converting a bunch of data stored in (of course!) Excel spreadsheets into a more relational database, with the ability to export that data in order to mail merge thank-you and fundraising letters.
Continue reading: New England GiveCamp 2011: What A Weekend! »
Designers And Developers: Donate Your Time, Talent At New England GiveCamp, June 11-13, 2010
One of the things I found out about at Tuesday’s MSDN Northeast Roadshow stop in Augusta is the first New England GiveCamp, June 11-13 at Microsoft’s Northeast Research and Development center in Cambridge, MA.
I’m attending, and I’d urge you to do so.
A GiveCamp is basically a gathering of developers, DBAs, project managers, designers and other IT folks in a given place, to donate their time and skills to charitable projects.
In the case of the New England GiveCamp, typical projects include upgrading Access databases, or converting Excel spreadsheets to Access; integrating open-source tools, such as Joomla, Drupal and Django, into existing Web sites; adding various gizmos to and tuning up existing Web sites; and several requests to spruce up the look of various types of collateral.
I believe the biggest mistake you could make in deciding whether to participate is thinking that you don’t have the kind of skills needed. From what’s been said at the GiveCamp’s Web site, there’s going to be plenty to do, whether you’re Linus Torvalds or Linus Van Pelt.
I think this goes doubly for graphic designers. Trust me, if you are an artistic person, no matter how little you think of your work, your worst effort is 10 times better than the best design ever produced by a programmer. I am speaking from extensive personal experience here. We’re the people who gave the Internet Comic Sans, animated GIFs and the <marquee> tag, remember. Please, save us from ourselves.
As the Northeast GiveCamp put it, “If you have the passion, we’ll find a place for you.”
In addition to the technical work on site, there are a myriad other volunteer opportunities both before and during the event, including registration, sponsor solicitation, organizing the development teams and matching them to non-profit organizations, handling logistics for food and snacks, and others we’ll discover along this journey!
An ASP.NET System To Allow Site Members To Contribute Content, Part 1: Overview
Crowdsourcing is all the rage these days, and even if you’re not managing a social media Web site, sometimes it’s helpful to accept content from end users.
For example, one of my clients has a community calendar on its Web site. Since the inception of the calendar, staff time had been devoted to retyping e-mailed and snail-mailed items into that calendar’s back end.
That was almost entirely wasted time, which my client rightfully wanted applied to something more profitable. My client wanted to allow staff to approve, edit or delete calendar submissions before they appeared on the site, but asked me to shift the burden of actually adding items directly onto the shoulders of site visitors.
Thanks to ASP.NET’s built-in membership system, we can easily provide a simple system for allowing end users to provide content. Not only that, but thanks to the role-based permissions incorporated into membership, we can even presort content to specific sections of the site, based on who is submitting it; grant specific users or user groups the ability to bypass an approval process; throttle contribution allowances; basically, any permission or restriction you might want to use.
I am going to make a simple cancellations notification system as my demo.
After all, everyone wants to know if school is closed, or whether the play is still on in spite of the weather. Because canceling school, play, etc. generally comes down to a single person’s decision — or, at most, a few people — we can easily provide a system to log in, select a few options or enter a bit of text, and save everyone the time and grief such notifications otherwise take.
The specific features I will demo, in this and upcoming blog entries, will be:
- an administrative interface to add, edit and delete memberships;
- another administrative interface to add, edit or delete membership roles (i.e., membership groups), and to assign members to those groups, as well as to assign users to specific schools, organizations, etc.;
- an administrative interface to approve, edit or delete cancellation notices;
- a private form to allow membership to post cancellations for the schools, organizations, etc. with which they have been associated;
- a public view of cancellations that have been approved for viewing.
Continue reading: An ASP.NET System To Allow Site Members To Contribute Content, Part 1: Overview »
