Archive for March, 2010

SnapCamp Retrospective

Tuesday, March 2nd, 2010

Make doing good easy: It’s been the motto of SnapImpact since the project got off the ground this time last year. The ‘make’ part of that has never been the easiest part to accomplish, especially since our organization is 100% volunteer.

Yet in a few months, we had a volunteerism blog plug-in. Two months later, we offered the first location-based iPhone app for volunteering. Recently, we partnered with AllforGood.org to broaden the reach of volunteerism to more people in more places than the world has ever seen.

SnapCamp 2010 was an experiment that we hoped would prove the exact thing that we set out to accomplish – that when armed with an easy way to do some good for the world, we could find enough people willing to lend a hand to make it happen. The hypothesis held. 30 people from as far away as Texas and Washington, DC joined a core group of SnapImpact volunteers and others from the Denver/Boulder technology community on the weekend of February 19th to rebuild and refine the ambitious All for Good project so that it was fit to deliver on its role as the largest aggregator of volunteer opportunities the world has seen. The local business community demonstrated their support for the project by donating space, coffee, beer, food, and more.

You can meet the people and companies that made this possible and find out how the weekend came together on our SnapCamp Posterous blog. Here is what 30 volunteers with just 36 hours accomplished to help make AllforGood.org the future of volunteering in America:

The software engineering squad, led by SnapImpact Co-Founder Dave Angulo, built 70% of the infrastructure supporting the beta version of All for Good 2.0. The scrappy team included 15 developers, some experienced in the Scala Lift programming language, others there to learn it, formed the foundation of the upcoming Summer release that the SnapImpact team will continue working on in our regular sessions. Eight of those developers contributed 48 code commits over the 36 hours of the project. That’s about 2 an hour when you factor in sleep, or ’superhuman speed’ in plain English.

A team of marketing minds from fields like publishing, innovation consulting, and business growth established a plan to market a more nimble All for Good to the world surrounding the ambitious Cities of Service nationwide event happening this summer.

Our three-man-weave of a design team filled up four whiteboards with sketches and ideas and mocked up a new idea in a single day’s work, and two more web designers implemented the design in another half a day. You can check out a sneak-peek tour of the design given by Dan, the project leader for the design team.

Jonathan Greenblatt, the President of All for Good, and Fiona Schlachter, the Director of SnapImpact, worked with representatives of the AARP’s Create the Good program and the federal government’s Corporation for National and Community Service (the Serve.gov folks) to talk about what the stakeholders of the project need the most. This conversation guided the roadmap toward All for Good 2.0 and beyond by making something that was amenable to all of the organizations that must work together to make something like All for Good happen, which is crucial to the program’s ongoing success.

Now, the SnapImpact team will take this work forward and build diligently toward a May release of the new All for Good. If you live in the Denver/Boulder area and would like to get involved in the delivery of the new All for Good, we meet most Tuesday nights in Boulder. Become a fan of SnapImpact on Facebook to find out when the next working session is and how you can help us out.

Thanks to everyone who made SnapCamp a reality. More to come soon!

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