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INETA October Newsletter
Posted by Toi B Wright at 10/09/2008 5:44 PM
This is an article from the INETA October Newsletter, www.ineta.org.
Have you ever wanted to get recognized by your peers for building a really cool
application? How about if you could help someone in need at the same time? That
is the mission of the "We Are Microsoft Charity Challenge Weekend". On January 16-18,
2009 an enthusiastic group of volunteer developers from the south central part of
the US will descend on BravoTECH (http://www.bravotech.com) in Dallas, Texas. At
the end of this 72 hour coding marathon, 20 charities will have new ASP.NET applications.
Toi Wright (http://www.onestopdesigns.com), the organizer of this event, president
and founder of the local ASP.NET UG (http://www.dallasasp.net) and a Microsoft MVP
award recipient, said that this was our chance to "donate our time and talents for
the benefit of the community". She went on to explain that this is the second time
that they are having this event. Chris Koenig (http://blogs.msdn.com/chkoenig),
the Microsoft Developer Evangelist for the region, told me that he came up with
the idea, talked about it with Toi and she picked up the ball and ran with it. Toi
said "as the mother of a child with special needs I know how difficult it is for
these charities to get funding, and nothing gets budgeted for IT spending, let alone
IT development. With this project, we have the ability to use our specialized skills
to help them solve their business problems."
They have a great group of volunteer business analysts, developers, designers, DBA's
and event staff that will be helping out before, during and after the event to ensure
that the charities get great applications. Before the event the business analysts
will meet with each of the charities to dig into the business problem that the charity
needs the software to solve. From that point the analyst will prepare requirements
that will be loaded into Team Foundation Server (donated by Notion Solutions, http://www.notionsolutions.com).
Over the weekend of the event the developers, designers and DBA's will build the
applications utilizing client tools donated to the charities by Microsoft, controls
donated by Telerik, Infragistics, ComponentArt and others. If the charity needs
hosting, Verio (http://www.verio.com) will be on hand with donated hosting accounts
and tech support. Finally voting will take place to determine which team built the
best application.
Since this was such a great success last year, two other groups have already run
their own events, the Ann Arbor Give Camp (http://www.annarborgivecamp.org) and
Coders for Charities(http://coders4charities.org). In addition to the event in Dallas,
there are two other events currently scheduled: Twin Cities Give Camp (http://twincitiesgivecamp.org)
and Indy Give Camp (http://indygivecamp.org). So, if you are in the Dallas area
and want to help, go to the website (http://wearemicrosoft.com) and toss your name
into the hat. If you want to run a Give Camp in your area, go to http://givecamp.org
or contact Chris Koenig(Chris.Koenig@microsoft.com). President Bush in a recent
talk about volunteer service said "You know, there's an old adage that says, you
can bring hope to the lives of others, but the life you enrich the most will probably
be your own."
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