Ann Arbor Give Camp: 'Amazing'

There aren't enough superlatives to describe the first annual Ann Arbor Give Camp, held over the weekend at Washtenaw Community College.

That's the word from Jennifer Marsman, a Microsoft Corp. developer evangelist who worked on the project.

"It was amazing," she said Monday afternoon. "It was so good. It completely exceeded my expectations."

The camp saw a shade over 100 software developers build new applications and Web sites for free for 15 area charities.

Marsman said the event succeeded despite challenges like charities dropping out at the last minute and new ones being brought in, making sure developers were assigned to charities they could support and had the proper skills, and making sure groups of friends stayed together on a project.

She also noted "this incredible phenomenon where developers would start working on a problem and say, 'Hey, you know who's really good at that is this friend of mine,' so they would call their friend and the friend would say, 'Sure, I can come over and help for a little while.' So we had extra people showing up."

Marsman said a number of nonprofits wanted Web sites, and they got great ones. Included is the Golightly Academy of IT, a Detroit magnet school that teaches an IT curriculum for half the school day to at-risk students. Another project was a volunteer time management system that, for example, allows a charity to staff a booth for blocs of time. It was written to be organization-generic, and it's now up for your downloading pleasure on codeplex.com, Microsoft's open source portal. Check it out at http://www.codeplex.com/GiveTime.

There were also remote teams participating in the camp from Knoxville, Tenn. and Columbus, Ohio -- with Marsman noting the irony of Ohio State territory helping out the Ann Arbor event.

Lots of developers also decided to work most of the night and just crash for a few hours at WCC, "so there were people sleeping everywhere. I have some really cute pictures." There are also pictures at this link, and I found cool blog posts describing Give Camp here and here. Included is the completely charmingly named Coding Geekette.

Marsman said the equivalent value of development time and expense was about half a million dollars, figuring 100 developers working for 30 hours at $150 an hour plus expenses like hosting, software, meals and other expenses.

Congratulations to event organizers Todd Bohlen, John Hopkins, Kristina Jones, Jennifer Marsman, Patrick Steele and Bill Wagner, and to sponsors Arbor Brewing Co., Aubree's Pizza, Busch's Markets, DevMavens, Domino's Pizza, Dunkin Donuts, Infragistics, Microsoft, SRT Solutions, TechSmith, Telerik, Trader Joe's and Verio.