I love tech community events. I’ve attended a handful of BarCamps and related meetups over the past few years, but when my good friend Kelley told me about a June event in Boston, I wasn’t really sure what to expect. It was a GiveCamp: a 48-hour event at which around a hundred designers and developers donated their skill and time to two dozen non-profit organizations from around New England. The organizations walked in on Friday with a project they wanted to complete. The goal was ambitious; in two days’ time, each of the projects should be completed to a point where the non-profit could manage it within the organization.
It turned out to be a completely new and definitely unforgettable experience for me.
Code away
After braving Boston traffic, I arrived at Microsoft’s New England Research and Development (NERD) Center on Friday evening. We met in the largest room on the first floor and briefly introduced each organization and worker. Every worker had been previously assigned to an organization for the weekend, and each team met to discuss the project and develop a plan.
Then the work began. For the next 48 hours, designers and developers worked together alongside representatives from each non-profit organization. Some workers floated between projects to use their talents in as many ways as possible. Considering each worker probably spent fifteen hours of the weekend on projects, I think it’s safe to say that GiveCamp enabled 1,500 hours of work on projects that in many cases wouldn’t have been able to be completed due to limited budgets or resources.
Bed, breakfast, lunch, dinner, and more
Though the focus of the weekend was centered around project development, it was far from the only component of the event. Representatives of the non-profits at the event had a chance to attend workshops about tech-related parts of their business (web security, WordPress usage, and more). The workers (as is to be expected with those who work on the web) balanced their work time with a healthy portion of fun and play (mostly in the form of Rock Band).
The heartiest of the group brought along their sleeping bags and slept on the floors and couches at the beautiful NERD Center. Late nights allowed some amazing views of the Boston skyline as well as some obligatory sounds-like-they’re-drunk tweets.
And there was food. It seemed as though there was a new selection of gourmet options every hour in the common area of the floor: pizza, pasta, French toast, ice cream, cake, granola bars, salad… The workers may have been tired, but they were far from hungry.
The lessons
You may notice that I haven’t talked a lot about the actual coding that we did during the camp. The code was a big part of the weekend, of course, but in my mind it’s not really that important. We gathered on Sunday afternoon to present our work in front of the entire group and see what we had accomplished during our time at NERD. During the presentations it was easy to tell that the code wasn’t what mattered to the organizations; it was what the code allowed them to do. Maybe it helped plan activities for kids. Maybe it helped tag people and objects in photos from developing countries. Maybe it helped recruitment for a youth soccer league. The presentations were emotional for everyone involved with the work done over the weekend.
I made a point to walk around the floor as people were working a number of times throughout the weekend. Here were a hundred workers spending a weekend creating something for an organization which in many cases they’d never known until a few days prior. There was an energy and a sense of passion I’ve been lucky enough to experience a few times in my life. These people were doing something. There was no talk of budgets, no pestering from managers, and no complaining about a lost weekend. A hundred people came together and did good.
I learned a lot about myself over the course of the weekend. Some lessons were personal, but some have changed me in a way that’s visible to anyone I see. I rediscovered how much I love working with passionate, skilled people who want to do all they can to achieve a goal. I learned that I’d rather spend a weekend helping out than taking a trip to Acadia or laying around in bed. And I found once again that people coming together can accomplish great things.
Jim O’Neil concluded the weekend with a presentation about what we’d been able to accomplish. Jim, one of Microsoft’s northeast evangelists, had worked together with Kelley and many others to bring the idea of GiveCamp in Boston to life. On his last slide, he hinted at the possibility of a second New England Give Camp in 2011.
Sign me up now, Jim. I’ll be there.