One part nerd Olympics, one part community service project and one part race-against-the-clock — Sierra Bravo’s Overnight Website Challenge partnered with twelve deserving Minnesota non-profits, including Rein in Sarcoma, with teams of talented web developers for 24 hours of fun collaboration on Feb 28 to March 1 culminating in new fully operational websites. All for free!
The RIS team had the great fortune to be assigned to work with the "IB" team from Internet Broadcasting. The IB team won the challenge last year and we think they have come up with an equally great new website for Rein in Sarcoma. Led by Susan Inglis, the IB team consisted of ten website developers, programmers, designers, graphic artists. We think they were the best, most dedicated, and talented team at the Challenge!
The event brought a party atmosphere, friendly competition, reality show flair, that summer-camp kumbaya feel and most importantly, a sense of immediacy to the concept of in-kind philanthropy to the Twin Cities web development community. The RIS website team at the event included: Greg Beaumont, Gary and Steve Bucher, Carol Carlson, Lisa Griebel, Brian Osterman, Eric Skogman and Pete Wyckoff. Pete had the dubious honor of being there for the full 24 (make it 27) hours!
For an insight into the weekend, click here for the comments of Carol Carlson, the RIS Data Manager and 62-year-old gray-haired geek.
In the weeks that followed both the RIS and IB web-teams worked to get the site ready for going live. Literally hundreds of volunteer hours were contributed by both the IB Professionals and the RIS "highly skilled" volunteers. Flash elements had to be developed and they needed to work. The Drupal format for the website needed to be modified, and layout refined by the IB Team.
The RIS team had five years worth of relevant data from the old site to enter, revise, update, and format. Hundreds of images needed to be transferred and used in different ways. New Forms needed to be created. Entire new sections such as Sarcoma 101, RIS Networking, and Sarcoma Stories needed to be developed and uploaded. The result is what you see before you.
To learn more about the Sierra Bravo Overnight Website Challenge, click here.
To view Rein in Sarcoma's successful proposal, click here