I went to wineCamp and all you got was this blog post

So what was WineCamp, and what happened?

Well, you can read about it - just click to find out who is talking about WineCamp, who took photos at WineCamp and who is tagging WineCamp on Technorati and Del.icio.us. And even if you don't know what that means, you can click away and read more.

Me in deep coonversation, courtesy of Miss Rogue.

My far too simple attempt at describing what happened:
A bunch of developers, "start-up"-sy types, nonprofit techies and a few brave "What's a wiki?" folks converged on a wind-swept ridge in Skeleton County, a grassy patch with no running water and no electricity, but a beautiful view and several rustic picnic tables and firepits built by hand by vineyard owner Andrew Ferriere - and spent a day talking about various techie-social-good topics - then the next day swooped (or swoopt as the Canadians might spell it) down to a winery with wireless access to work on some real-life coding as well as continuing the conversations. For example:

• Libba from Outpost for Hope, that helps find missing persons, was offered a website makeover (including functionality upgrades to their youth database search tools) by the CivicSpace crew. By the time I left, they had not completed the all the finishing touches on the site makeover, but it was definitely a feet-to-the-fire test for the Drupal superstars to crank out what they did in 5 hours. I'll be pointing to whatever comes out of the code-sprint whenever/ wherever it shows up.

• A woman representing The Princess Project - that provides prom dresses to girls who could not otherwise afford them - wants to explore using open-source community and donor management tools for her organization, and brainstormed how to convince her funders to fund the development of these tools.

• We had a small-group conversation about how technologies can be leveraged in countries where there is no broadband technology infrastructure to support the use of current Web-based tools - so what is possible as an alternative? Several other conversations sprung out of this, including mobile digital storytelling, extending the use of mobile technology, and how to use simple tools like a cell phone to do work - for money - in remote villages from Guatemala to Tanzania. We agreed to follow-up on these topics - most likely on the Omidyar network (but I'll point you from here when that happens).

• On the day-of-coding (Day 2), a group of digital video folks jammed together a quick videocast ad on how technology can benefit nonprofits, using Drupal as the tech and Lines Ballet as the nonprofit. Part of the point was to cross-train several people on the video-production basics, but something tells me that ad will make it online - possibly by NetSquared?

Filed under: WineCamp