We can honestly say that without The Community Foundation’s support, we would not have gotten very far. Your support has allowed us to focus on the project while you took care of our nonprofit administration. We brought you an idea for a nonprofit startup that we developed during a sushi eating contest and you provided the nonprofit umbrella for us to make it happen which was an amazing feat. Thank you so much – we love you!

We gotta give a huge shout out to the Van Heyst Group who have provided our workspace. Our productivity is directly linked to these fine facilities and for that we are forever grateful. Thank you so much for everything. Looking for office space to rent? They have some available and it is awesome.

Both Rally Software and Amazon have provided key infrastructure components for us to develop and deliver these applications. You have made our process so much easier which is key for a large group of volunteers who are writing and testing code (you know exactly what I mean).

The Boulder Denver New Tech Meetup has been a home base for us and we can’t tell you how much the love has powered us forward. We have pitched our ideas, read your tweets (be nice!), and appreciated all of the feedback and support. Remember, we are just getting started and have much more to do so we hope you will continue to provide this tremendous lifeline to this project.

To our web and logo designers, Christopher Ritter and Chris Freitag, we don’t know how to thank you. You have developed the face of SnapImpact and we are honored to work with you. YOU ROCK!

Our volunteers. So many people. There were so many who helped us to get started and who have supported us over the time taken to get to this point, check out Andrew Hyde’s and Stepan Mazurov’s fabulous photos. Thanks for helping us get this off the ground. We could not have persevered without ya!

Most recently, we have had a kick ass software development crew – Ryan Schneider, Hassan Abdel-Rahman, Neil Simon, Tony Kay, Dave Angulo, Orn Kristjansson, Mark Chance, Eric Telingator, and Sue Uyetake.  They have worked hard slinging code with only mediocre pizza and good beer to sustain them while keeping full time jobs and family happy. You are heroes.

The current rock star business development team includes Nicole Glaros, Josh Clauss, Katrina Florence, Rick Saltzman, Rich Grote, Brett Greene, Dan Hellman, Mark Haeg, Luke Tilsley, Kevin Cloughley, and Phong Le. You slaved away to develop the feature set, build out a PR and marketing plan, and continue to push our project forward (over a few bottles of excellent tequila). Thanks for doing this while keeping bosses and families happy along the way.

Finally, our data partners HandsOn Network and All For Good, are truly the engine of SnapImpact. They provide the data that fuels the volunteering process and we are proud to call them partners.

We are the luckiest startup nonprofit in the world. Thanks to everyone!

It was standing room only, and I was squeezed way in the back when announcement time came around. Some guy named Dave stood up and said that he was looking for iPhone developers for a volunteering application. A couple books and a crash course on Cocoa hardly makes me an iPhone dev, but I’d been wanting to learn for some time, so I tracked him down after the meetup. And the rest is history. Recent history. Still in the making, actually, since we’re still plugging away.

Which brings me to my point: iPhone development is capital F-U-N fun. I’ve done most of the major languages, but Obj-C is the first one I’ve picked up in a matter of hours vs. days or weeks. Think about it: on Febuary 1st, I had a vague idea that the iPhone used something called Cocoa, and that Objective C “was sort of like C++, but not”. Yesterday I got my first data-bound UI up and running. And this isn’t full time by any means, just an hour here and there where possible, and a couple stints on the weekend.

But the real reason I piqued up at the iVolunteer opprotunity was that, as a telecommuter, I’ve gotten kind of bored with discussing application design and implementation with myself. So, why not share the fun? You really don’t need to know the first thing about iPhone development, just a general computer programming background is more than enough to get started. You don’t even need an iPhone, just a Mac, some curiosity, and patience while the SDK downloads.

We’ve got our data model foundation pretty well worked out, so now it’s the fun stuff: a slick UI, tight look and feel, and all the cool little bells and whistles that make an app really shine. Even if you don’t want to touch a line of code, a keen eye for design is also very welcome. So if you want a chance to learn a new technology while contributing to a really good cause, drop us a line. Or look for us at next week’s BDNT Meetup in Boulder.

This week we flushed out development tasks, got developers access to the files, got briefed on the legal aspect of things and took a look at a new homepage mock. Thanks to Rally for providing space, pizza and beer!

Check out Stepan’s iVolunteer set on Flickr.

iVolunteer Meetup Location

iVolunteer Meetup

Tuesday, January 27, 2009
5:00pm – 9:00pm
Van Heyst Group Office
719 Walnut St
Boulder, CO  [map]

As mentioned at the last New Tech Meetup, iVolunteer’s first working session will be held on Tuesday, January 27. After the closing of RedFish Brewery, the folks at the Van Heyst Group graciously stepped up and offered their space to our efforts. Thank you!

iVolunteer has no employees and is entirely a not-for-profit endeavor. We see the project as a way to support community organizations across the country and also as a showcase for Boulder’s incredible depth of startup talent. We’ll have our laptops out hacking on code for the iPhone app and website, working on marketing plans, writing blog posts, and doing whatever needs doing to make iVolunteer successful.

Equal parts social and working, this is a great opportunity to meet interesting people in the Boulder community and work on something big. Bring your friends and anyone else who might be good to have along for the ride.

RSVP here: http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=46562643122

Thanks!

Dave Angulo (@daveangulo)
Rich Grote (@heyrich)

iVolunteer is a free location-aware iPhone application that makes it easy for people to find one-time volunteer opportunities and get involved in their communities.

With the participation and support of Boulder’s awesome tech scene, we are in a great position with iVolunteer. Dave Angulo has rewritten the server back end, the development of both the website and iPhone app are progressing, we have secured 501(c)3 status as a component fund of The Community Foundation, and we have a data sharing agreement with the Hands On Network which utilizes their new API. We were very fortunate in the timing of our agreement with Hands On Network, as we contacted them right as they were making significant changes to that API. With Dave’s background in web service development, we were able to give them some timely advice on how to make their service more scalable and their API most useful to their data consumers.

While the data from Hands On Network is enough for us to meet our requirements to launch (“one-time low-commitment volunteering opportunities covering the entire US”), our hope has always been that our database be as large as possible. To that end, we’ve had very positive conversations with VolunteerMatch and are continuing to reach out to the American Red Cross, United Way, and other sources for event data. Please let us know if you have any great leads with folks in those organizations!

Creating iVolunteer is an all-volunteer effort started by Dave Angulo and Rich Grote. We would be nowhere if so many talented folks hadn’t volunteered their time and amazing abilities to making the project a reality. Thanks to Bracken Christensen for the sweet logo, Andrew Hyde for his awesome design work, Ryan Imel for turning that design into CSS, Chris Browne for his work on the iVolunteer website, and Aubrey Francois for his contributions to the iPhone app. Brian Burns is our master wordsmith and Gerhard Rivera has shown an inspiring willingness to step in wherever we need.

People are drawn to the startup scene for three main reasons. To make a bunch of money, to work on something cool and important, and to work with awesome people who are fun and wicked smart. Since iVolunteer is going to be given away at the App Store for free, we can’t do much for the first one. But we’ve definitely got the last two handled.

To continue to make this project social and move quickly, we’re setting up a weekly informal meetup at RedFish Brewhouse on Tuesday nights, beginning January 27th. It’ll be part hackathon, part technology discussion, part group blogging adventure, part strategy session, and all fun. No experience necessary, just bring your enthusiasm. More details to follow in additional blog posts, join us!