WineCamp

I spent last weekend at WineCamp. A group of technologists and non-profits camped over the weekend at the beautiful Ferriere Vineyards in Calaveras county. The wine produced by Andrew Ferriere is absolutely superb. I had some honest and frank discussions about technology with some very vocal folks. There were several guys from techsoup and CompuMentor there. They told me how Microsoft is donating a ton of software to them and how they are distributing Microsoft technologies to lots and lots of non profits in order to help them be more successful. For a company that is so so bad, Microsoft sure does a lot of good. Some of the highlights were swimming in a river that runs through a cave, and doing geek yoga. My mission, when I walked into the event was to find if it is possible to bring together a group of geeks to build an application for a non-profit over a 2 or 3 days that is functional and can actually solve a non-profit's problems. As it happened Outpost for Hope needed a website. A group got together and coded it for 5 hours. For 5 hours they got quite far. Another non-profit that made an impression with me is interplast.