Karma Geek's Mission

From KarmaGeek

Contents 1 Karma Geek was born out of necessity AND invention: 1.1 Hosted Service Aggregation 1.2 Connect Geeks With Organizations in Need 1.3 IT Training 1.4 Design and Development

[edit] Karma Geek was born out of necessity AND invention:

Necessity: For many of us developers, we truly have the desire to give back to the community in a way that is meaningful, but we have limited time to do so. What can we do in less than 2 hours?

For many nonprofit organizations, it can be difficult to understand and implement some of the technology that is freely available.

Invention: Mashupcamp camp demonstrated talented developers tapping into the APIs of various sites to come up with ingenious tools and websites that could help with productivity and efficiency.

Solution: Putting these three things together and creating a toolkit of opportunities and solutions for both nonprofits and developers so that everybody wins. Since developers only have 2 hours to contribute, Karmageek will leverage their time by engaging them to teach high school and college students about the technologies, then letting the students work directly with nonprofits in their area.

Bonus: Not only does this maximize the value of everyone's time, but it also provides the students with real life examples to work with as well as access to professionals in the field.

 What can we provide as karma geeks that isn't already out there for non-profits to take advantage of?  We've been thinking about this and we need your help. 

The following ideas are things that we would approach in stages:

[edit] Hosted Service Aggregation

• We sign up big companies to provide things like domain hosted e-mail, donation services, calendaring, etc, as well as the experts who can and we get them all set up for the non-profits.
• We provide a platform for non-profits to build their websites on - this should use:
  • open services
  • web standards
  • open source
  • mashup existing technology to provide world-class sites to non-profits that otherwise wouldn't be able to afford them.

[edit] Connect Geeks With Organizations in Need

• Initially initial discussion, we talked about geeks only being able to commit to things that take two hours or less. It would be a good ideal to shoot for: Break down big projects into discreet atomic tasks that take qualified geeks two hours or less to complete.
• The tools for project intake and completion include a step where projects are broken down into discreet tasks, like "installing Rails", "setting up MySQL", "creating widget to load an RSS feed", etc.
• Geeks provide skill profiles (kind of starting on the Volunteer page) and availability so we can connect geeks with tasks.
• There should be "local geeks" and "global geeks" - because a lot of the tasks will involve training, and some will provide code. Coders don't need to be local, but the trainers (and folks who set up machines, e-mail clients, calendars, etc) probably do.

[edit] IT Training

• • We sign up local volunteers who can go teach non-profits how to use the stuff we set up for them.

[edit] Design and Development

• • We set up karmaGeek "franchises", where local web shops know how to use our platform and will commit to doing either pro bono or reduced rate work for them to help them with branding and customization.

I think that's a lot to bite off. We need to have a discussion to see what we can do first, and how we can start chipping away at the list.