[Rubyforchange-talk] Ideas for charity events

[Chad Fowler]

On 8/13/07, Todd Olivas <todd at topstorm.org> wrote:
> I like the idea of doing small projects for clients and donating the
> money.  If the company knows up front that the money is going to
> charity, they may be willing to match some of the funds.  This way, the
> charity gets a bigger donation, and the company gets a tax break on the
> extra funds.  For this to work, we may have to limit ourselves to tax
> exempt charities.   I assume most charities have this, so it is probably
> not much of an issue.
>

Yea, we should only consider (at least in the US) 501(c)3 tax-exempt
organizations or the equivalent.  I'd say that's pretty much the first
line of filtering.

I like the idea of a hack night and of doing client work for charities
a bit, though I'm afraid the quality or follow-through client might
suffer if we're not careful.  Since we wouldn't be working directly
for the charity it might be harder to remain, well, charitable when
dealing with a commercial client.  I'm not sure charity-driven
software development is a sound way to run a commercial business.

I do like Jeremy's silent auction fund raising idea.  Anyone have
experience with something like this and might be interested in coming
up with ideas for an upcoming conference?  I want to avoid the plain
"give money at this URL' approach we took at RailsConf just so it
doesn't get tiresome.


Chad

> Todd
>
>
> Jeremy McAnally wrote:
> > Hello everyone,
> > I was curious about whether or not they were planning a charity event
> > at RubyConf, and upon asking Chad told me they hadn't really planned
> > one yet but were open to new and interesting ideas.
> >
> > I though I'd post here to get a discussion going about some of the
> > ideas I've had and see if anyone else has any excellent ideas.  Of
> > course, a workshop is a great idea but I'm sure there's a twist on it
> > that no one has tried yet...
> >
> > One idea I had is a twist on the Ruby for Change idea, in that you
> > assemble teams of developers to do small projects for clients and then
> > donate the money to a charity.   Or, you could assemble people into
> > hack night groups at RubyConf or the Ruby Hoedown or whatever, and
> > over the course of the conf they hack together a marketable
> > product/website (e.g., ActiveReload's Warehouse) that will give its
> > proceeds to charity.
> >
> > One idea I had and didn't get to implement at the Hoedown is a silent
> > auction of stuff like books, training, hosting, etc.  It could be
> > something as simple as "a copy of Beginning Ruby" to something like "a
> > pair programming session with Matz."  I've seen things similar to that
> > done that have yielded huge amounts of money.
> >
> > Anyone else have any ideas?  I hope we can kick up some good ideas for
> > myself and other conference organizers to use.
> >
> > Thanks a lot,
> > Jeremy
> >
> >
>
> _______________________________________________
> Rubyforchange-talk mailing list
> Rubyforchange-talk at rubyforge.org
> http://rubyforge.org/mailman/listinfo/rubyforchange-talk
>