Giving -- and receiving -- at Give Camp
It's Day 3, and the Ann Arbor Give Camp is just wrapping up and we're about to start the report outs. (If you don't know what Give Camp is, see here -- suffice it to say it's about developers banding together to crank out projects for charities in a 45 hour funfest). All the work that will be done this weekend has been done. Now, it's time to celebrate!
The Ann Arbor Give Camp is the third give camp, following on earlier events this year in Kansas City and Dallas, and I'm sure there will be more coming. We had over 100 developers working on projects for 11 charities, and it was truly amazing to see teams of people from Traverse City, MI, to Knoxville, TN, pulling together for a bunch of good causes!
Huge credit for this event goes to Jennifer Marsman, who spearheaded the whole thing. I know Josh Holmes, John Hopkins, Todd Bohlen, and many others were critical to pulling things together, too.
Beyond just being a fan of the Give Camp, I'm especially thankful for the work done for the Golightly Academy of IT, as I'm on the Board there. I wish the staff at Golightly could've been here this weekend, but they were off at the Annual NAF conference. I did my best to stand in for them, and we're finishing the weekend with a solid foundation that the Golightly Academy of IT can build on. Yeah! 
Thanks to Telerik for donating a Sitefinity license, to Verio for free hosting (the site's not quite live yet, waiting for verio to finish activating the site), and Microsoft for donating the software needed to maintain the site going forward. And most importantly, special thanks to the awesome team that worked on the Golightly Academy of IT site!
Thank you thank you thank you!!!
John Mullinax is a Platform Strategy Advisor with Microsoft's DPE Team. Before joining Microsoft in 2006, John held a vartiety of positions at Ford Motor Company, most recently leading IT services strategy to support explosive business growth in China. Other positions included: Enterprise Architect, Application Portfolio Management, Technology Governance, and Product Manager. Prior to joining Ford, John earned his MBA at the University of Washington. Before that, he was Director of Elections for Douglas County, Washington, where he conducted the first Federal mail-ballot election in the USA. Subsequently, he joined the Secretary of State's office as a consultant working with county election officials in Washington state to improve operational effectiveness, integrity, and security (aka, to prevent the kind of debacle we saw in Florida in 2000).
