Read all about the recent New England GiveCamp on Jim O’Neil’s blog:

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/jimoneil/archive/2011/05/05/new-england-givecamp-2011-recap.aspx

A few brave souls even followed some well-documented best practices and set up some tents!

Congratulations Jim, and all the folks from New England GiveCamp on another successful event!

/ck

Give Camp Birmingham | Promo from Hampton Road Studios on Vimeo.

At the Ann Arbor Give Camp, almost 50 volunteers got together to build software for a dozen charities. This episode takes you behind the scenes at this great event.

An extended 60-minute version of this episode will appear in January on Channel 17 in Ann Arbor, MI. Below is this extended version

First, the best place to get information on how to run your own GiveCamp comes from our GiveCamp cookbook. The cookbook is basically the combined learnings of all the GiveCamp events that have come before, initially inspired by the first ever event, held in Dallas, TX in January of 2007 under the name “We Are Microsoft Charity Challenge Weekend”. The cookbook contains information about recruiting volunteers and charities, planning logistics from a location to meet to network, and more. There are also lots of tips on conducting the actual day-of event – dealing with volunteers, scheduling training, etc.  The cookbook is currently the closest thing to a GiveCamp bible, so refer to it often when planning your event.  If you have any feedback, please let us know by posting a comment and we’ll work to add

The next best place, especially for getting specific questions answered or getting advice from former leaders, is to use email and Twitter.  GiveCamp uses the @givecamp Twitter account and monitors the #givecamp hashtag.  If you want to toss out a question or observation, just tell us how excited you are about GiveCamp, Twitter is a great place to do it.  We also have an email address, givecamp@live.com, that you can submit questions directly to me and I’ll follow up with you as soon as I can.

In the past, we’ve also hosted a monthly call for all the GiveCamp organizers to get together and discuss questions, etc. I think that with the way that has been going, with so few people attending each month, we’re going to switch to just a Twitter and Email based support that we can offer around the clock rather than take up a block of time during the month to get together on a call.  This also lets ANYONE who is monitoring the #givecamp hashtag to contribute to the conversation.

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I’m very happy to report that one of our very first ever sponsors, Telerik, has reconfirmed their commitment to GiveCamp by sponsoring the National Day of GiveCamp!  Telerik’s sponsorship provides complimentary licenses for Sitefinity CMS and all Telerik .NET developer tools to GiveCamp events for both the charities and the participating developers! In addition, Gabe Sumner will be delivering a Telerik SiteFinity overview training session on Saturday for the non-proft end users to help them get up to speed on how to maintain their new site after it goes live.

Telerik SiteFinity has become one of the staples of GiveCamp project development, and I’m really excited for the opportunity to continue working with Emily, Todd, Gabe and the gang at Telerik.  If you are interested in working with Telerik on event sponsorship for a GiveCamp, Code Camp, Day of .NET or User Group meeting, please contact Emily at Emily.Parker@telerik.com.

About Telerik:

Telerik is a leading vendor of development, team productivity, and automated testing tools, as well as UI components and content management solutions for Microsoft .NET. Created with passion, Telerik products help software development teams every day to be more productive and to deliver reliable applications on time and under budget. Telerik was founded in 2002 by a few friends with a simple idea – to “deliver more than expected”. Nowadays, a market leader with a team of more than 220 professionals spread around the globe in 5 offices, Telerik is still true to its motto – building outstanding products and serving customers with fanatical dedication.

This past weekend, Ryan Cromwell and the incredible developer community of Southwest Ohio participated in the Southwest Ohio GiveCamp.  His staff of 12 Organizers, 65 Volunteers, over the course of 36 hours (1440 hours individually), with over 200 repository commits and a TON of caffeine, resulted in $144,000 in value delivered to 10 needy charities in the Cincinnati area. Feedback from the volunteers was amazing, and all the charities were very happy with the work that was done for them.

Here’s a list of the charities helped by the GiveCamp:

• http://john1512ministries.org
• http://setonfamilycenter.org
• http://elementz.org
• http://diabetesdayton.org
• http://www.hamilton-living-water-ministry.org
• http://esc.schenzcustomdesigns.com (End Slavery Cincinnati)
• http://civicgardencenter.org (Volunteer Service Coordination put online)
• http://wincincy.probas.co (Foreclosure Prevention Assistance & Upcoming Events)

There is also a great photo gallery online if you want to check out more pictures – personally, I like this one: a Dad teaching his son about how important it is to give back to the community.

Congratulations to all involved, and especially to the charities that now have new or updated websites! A special shout-out also goes to event organizer Ryan Cromwell for putting on such a great event!

To read Ryan’s event summary, visit his blog at http://blog.cromwellhaus.com/index.php/2010/10/mission-accomplished-southwest-ohio-givecamp/