After a long Overnight Website Challenge weekend, it can take a few days to re-gather your wits enough to think of everyone you should thank for playing their part.Behold, if you missed yesterday’s post on eyesores and thank-worthy eye candy. Due credit goes to all teams and every nonprofit for all you accomplished last weekend. Thanks for your service and your selfless collaboration:

• Twin Cities EE, serving Franconia Sculpture Park

• The Royal Canadian Kilted Yaksmen, serving Little Voyageurs Montessori School

• Team Pegacorn, serving Metro CISM Team

• The Return of the Team Redundancy Team Part 2, serving  Minnesota Environmental Partnership

• CodeX, serving Minnesota Coalition for the Homeless

• Push N Run, serving Hourcar

• Raxacoricofallapatorius, serving The Windmill Project

• PHP Nerds- Beta, serving Answer

• Drupal Rocks!, serving Bakken Museum

• Full Court WordPress, serving Youth Performance Company

• Ruby.MN, serving Career Solutions Inc

• Team BIOS, serving Community Neighborhood Housing Services

• Drop Shadows Not Bombs, serving North Star Therapy Animals

• Run PHP,  Cancer Legal Line

• Get Off My LAN, serving TVBYGIRLS

• Ruby Off Rails, serving Center for Homicide Research

• Sleep-Deprivation Research Team #4, serving The Valley Friendship Club

Extra credit goes to rightful-braggers Two Unicorns, One Moon for their pro bono work on behalf of West African Medical Missions. Team captain Jason Reed is a four-time Web Challenge veteran, and a champion of this initiative in every sense of the word. Thanks, and special congrats to the returning volunteers from last year’s winning TST Media team.

Moving on, thanks for letting us rock-star your rooms, Continuing Education Conference Center – particular thanks to all-night go-to-guy extraordinaire Mike Wybierala.

Thanks, judges Christine Durand, Christian Erickson, Dana Nelson and Jamey Erickson, for assessing the applications of 68 eligible orgs to pick this year’s nonprofits, and for joining us Sunday morning to assess overnight accomplishments.

Caffeine … I’m getting emotional here – expect to be hugged for pulling me through, again. I won’t forget this.

For supporting our nerdathon since it began, thanks to event sponsors VISI (offering free hosting to nonprofits) and Benchmark Learning (gracious hosts of our pre-Challenge needy-meets-nerdy speed-dating ritual).

In-kind supporters, thanks for all you’ve contributed, like:

• Arthouse: branded SWAG design, logistics and support
• Bacio, and Zelo: in unison ringing the dinner bell with salads and lasagna
• Crave: fresh/free fish via gift cards
• Espresso Royale: first breakfast, generously baked
• GitHub: private repos for any team interested
• Gyropolis: a whole-lotta-lamb and gyro fixins
• Jimmy Johns: veggie/gluten-free lunch fare
• The Lacek Group: helping us help vols from their company help nonprofits
• MinneWebCon: building community among nerds through education
• Peace Coffee: our cup runneth over with steamy goodness
• Pizza Luce’: midnight meal, deliciously repeated at 2 a.m.
• Red Bull: hundreds of cool silver cans and a wee-hour visit from mobile team
• Sopranos Kitchen: gift cards for post-Challenge fine dining
• St. Agnes Baking Co.: second breakfast, still arguably the most important meal of the day

Thanks also:

• Unwind Within for chair massages from four therapists beyond normal hours
• Nerds from 17 tech user groups who hosted tables during viewing hours
• Mustache Mike for stylish primping
• Kai Esbensen for 250 (new record, 238 last year) aeropressed coffees
• MCAD artists for caricature sketches
• Metro Ice Sculpture for the Donkey Kong luge
• Izzy’s Ice Cream: for 30-odd flavors and then some
• Molly Bush for leading yoga

Thanks, food fetchers: Kristen Schell; Diane Yang; Tracy Fuller; Cassi Hansen; John O’Neill; Sean Latterner; Eric Johnson; Tor Swanson; Jeremy Como; Jim Martin; Erica Tava

Other volunteers, all of them up for whatever, many of them up all night: Dave Kam; Jodi Chromey; Ericka, Ben, Max, & Jaycie Kimball; Gillian Reynolds; Eric Myers; Josh Klun; John Krenz; Wade Kallhoff; Dave Bucklin; Kris Szafranski; Ken Sykora; Mitch Buckland; Heather Keller; Janet Waack; David Medwid; Jon Huff; Katie O’Neill; Tom O’Neill; Mike Derheim; Mike Schmidt; Phillip Brand; Michelle Fuller; Matthew Alden; Jay Peyer; Greg Wurm; Lindsey Hagan; Eve Poeschl; Jamie Lindquist; Ginger Bucklin; Mary Ann Bucklin; Caleb Newby; Karsten Lundquist; Alyssa Fuller; Leah Otto;  Matt Tonak; Hillary Heinz; Tom Johnson; Mark Hurlburt; and Jessica Mogen.

Nerds are grateful to Nerdery founders Mike Derheim, Mike Schmidt and Luke Bucklin for creating a company where good ideas are given time to get even better.

For spreading the word on nerdy deeds – and future such opportunities, thanks to MPR, WCCO, KSTP, KARE 11, FOX 9, Star Tribune, Biz Journal, Pioneer Press, Tech.MN, MPLS Egotist, GiveMN.org and others.

Nonprofits, please measure the success of your new site any way you can, and let us know how it helps your organization “move the needle.” Keep in touch.

Nerds, tell us what can we do better or differently to lure you back next time.

Finally, an extra special thank you for anyone I may have fool-heartedly forgotten. C’mere, you…

One Response to “Thanks a gazillion to a long list of Web Challenge players”

1. 

   Boba  on March 29th, 2012

   Heya,

   Me and the rest of the team were discussing the judging at the OWC, and I have a few thoughts on it.

   After putting in so many hours helping out a nonprofit, finding out you’re not in the Final Four is anticlimactic. This isn’t just because everyone likes to win, the biggest part of it is that you have NO IDEA what the other teams did better than you, or what you did wrong. You don’t know what the judges were looking for, and so you have no way of knowing what you should improve for next year. Did we not emphasize something in our presentation that we should have? Did they hate the design? Was it about the amount of functionality? If a nonprofit has a great many needs and we meet them all, does that mean as much as another team that was able to meet all the needs of a less demanding nonprofit? Is ‘live at the end of 24 hours’ a factor in the judging? We just don’t know. No one is aware of what we’re being judged on, whether it changes from year to year, whether or not there’s a checklist involved, or whether it’s based more on ‘gut feel’, or a secret ranking/vote amongst the judges. We just don’t know, and the mystery of it is maddening and leads to a lot of second-guessing after the fact. “Should we have done this? What about that?”

   Being a previous veteran, I decided coming into this that I wouldn’t focus on win/lose, my ‘win’ was to help out our nonprofit. Instead of looking at it like a race, I looked at it like a marathon. Anyone who completes a marathon is a champion and deserves accolades and respect, no matter how they place.

   So my suggestion (and the suggestion of most of my team) would be this: Either provide more transparency in the judging process, or else get rid of the idea of ‘winners’ altogether. It’s not why we do the challenge, it’s really not what it’s all about. It’s an OWChallenge, not an OWCompetition. We (the nerds) are all in it together, and we all have a rare opportunity to take money off of the table and work creatively as a group to help out someone who really needs it, not just whoever pays our employer the most money for our time. That’s reward enough, and the race against the clock is its own competition, and we play it against ourselves.

   I’m not coming down on you guys, so I hope it doesn’t feel that way. The OWC is a great deal of fun and I’m definitely coming back next year, but I think the judging aspect is largely unnecessary. If we were to have judges at all, the other teams (including the nonprofits) would be a most acceptable judging committee for the rest of us. It always feels good to rate on the scale of one’s peers. One vote per team, arrived at by consensus, or perhaps a ‘Nerd’s Choice’ award in addition to the ‘Judge’s Choice’.

   Just a few thoughts, hope I didn’t offend.