The annual Day of Service at the NTEN NTC Conference has been a tradition since 2000. A group of nonprofit techies share their time and expertise with nonprofits from the local community. I've had the pleasure of being involved, along with long time colleague Cheryl Hanback, since almost the beginning.
Orlando Roundup 2002 - Day of Service - We Won The Swimming UpStream Award!
This year we saw a record turnout with more than 100 volunteers assisting about 60 Bay-Area organizations. In addition to the one-on-one consulting (captured by WeAreMedia Flickr BootCamp folks), a large group of nonprofit techies headed out to install two wireless networks, with equipment provided by Cisco, at the St. Anthony's Foundation and on Treasure Island.
Yes, this is a great feel good event!
Lots of good stories. We're not proclaiming wide ranging social impact, just giving a little back to the community.
Over the years, we've reiterated this event - from office visits, types of volunteer tasks, amount of time, workshops, and lots more. One thing does seem to stay constant. Every year we have last minute cancellations, no-shows, or people who show up for the event who didn't sign up. Because we try to match volunteer skills with organizations on a one-on-one basis, sometimes a volunteer's organization does not show up or we have to assign two volunteers to work with one organizations.
Because of the one-to-one matching of volunteers and 60 organizations, the logistics get unnecessarily complex -- (the incorrect table numbers were completely my fault, BTW.) Cheryl Hanback had a brilliant idea. She suggested that we set up tables organized by topic.
Yes, pizza by the slice! Let me explain.
Here Comes Everybody author Clay Shirky, keynote speaker at NTEN's Nonprfit Technology Conference told many inspiring stories and offered pithy quotes (captured expertly by Chad Norman)
One story that stuck in mine came when he explained how moving to New
York City from the midwest changed his perspective, because the population was big enough that you could sell pizza by the slice. So, it mean that pizzas were being created and baked before knowing who would purchase and eat them.
Maybe this is will solve the problem?
If you participated as a volunteer in the 09NTC Day of Service, please give us a few minutes of your time and let us know how we could improve the event going forward.
Also, I set up a DOS wiki and gathered up what I could find in terms of documentation - if you have photos, videos, or other a blog post, please add.
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