Code Your Art Out: If Non-Profits and Tech Had Babies
by jperras
Ever since I had the pleasure of keynoting at Make Web Not War: For The Web in 2010, I’ve been eagerly awaiting the announcement of the 2011 edition, which was announced just a few days ago.
The title of this year’s competition is Code Your Art Out, and the theme is that of “helping non-profits harness the power of technology in order to better serve its communities and members”. Oddly enough, this is a topic that I have discussed many times over the years with @katiestardust, and is thus very close to my heart.
The competition itself is rather simple: You register, think of an application that might be useful for non-profits (there’s a list of ideas available if you’re stuck), and the architect/code/design/innovate to your heart’s content. As an added incentive, there’s a non-negligible chunk of cash given out to the teams that place in first and second. The only technological requirements are that you need to use either the Windows Azure clould platform, or deploy on Windows IIS as your webserver.
While there’s no requirement that the applications developed be made available under an open source license, I’m hopeful that many submissions will choose to go this route.
The use of modern web technology stacks and applications in most non-profits is woefully lacking, and the space is ripe for innovation. I’m very excited to see what applications people develop!
A few resources:
Twitter account
Facebook Event page
Facebook Page
Comments
Hey joel,
can you go into more detail on how tying non-profits to msoft stack is in their best interest long term?
Too bad this is only for Canadian residents. However, it’s a great idea to implement in some other countries.
@meeech: Since it’s MSFT that’s putting up the cash prizes for the competition, I think it’s only fair that they require the use of their platform for entry.
Additionally, one of the possible two constraints is that the application must be deployed to Windows Azure. Since this is basically just a “cloud” webserver, there is very little barrier for a team wishing to port their application to Apache/nginx/lighttpd/etc. after the competition. I’m hoping that most entrants will utilize some sort of abstraction layer to make this as painless as possible.
“Since it’s MSFT that’s putting up the cash prizes for the competition, I think it’s only fair that they require the use of their platform…”
no argument there :)