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.

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.

I’m excited to announce that DevExpress has joined the ranks of GiveCamp partners! They’re offering free developer licenses to their amazing products if you participate as a developer in a GiveCamp event. The charity applications you create can also take advantage of the free license, so everybody wins!

DevExpress engineers feature-complete Presentation Components, Reporting Systems, IDE Productivity Tools and Business Application Frameworks for Visual Studio. Whether targeting the WinForms, ASP.NET, WPF or Silverlight platform, developer licenses for our award-winning product line are donated completely free of charge to allow you to create innovative solutions to solve the needs of your chosen charity.

If you want more information about how to take advantage of this generous offer at your local GiveCamp event, please contact Rachel Hawley at rachelh@devexpress.com

Thanks to Jason Beres and Sara Faatz from Infragistics for being our most recent National Sponsors!  Now GiveCamp events all over the world can take advantage of the powerful Infragistics controls and design libraries for FREE!  We’re very glad to have them as a sponsor and look forward to working with them in the coming years.

Here’s some information on Infragistics:

As a world leader in user interface development tools and experts in User Centered Design, Infragistics empowers developers to build and style immersive user experiences and rich data visualization in line of business applications across all .NET platforms — Windows Forms, WPF, ASP.NET and Silverlight. Infragistics will provide developer and designer licenses to GiveCamp teams and will, in many cases, have a representative onsite to assist with implementing the controls and utilizing the design libraries.

Contact: Sara Faatz (sfaatz@infragistics.com)

Thanks Jason, Sara and the team at Infragistics for your continued support for GiveCamp!

MID
9800 Association Ct.
Indianapolis, Indiana 46280

Make sure to get over to http://indygivecamp.org and sign up today!

Here are some interesting statistics from the event:

More pictures, videos and tweets can be found on our site at the #WAM2010 archive page.

All in all, the feedback was very positive from the developers, event staff, volunteers and the charities. We’re really looking forward to putting on another one next year!