The Minneapolis St. Paul Business Journal recently announced that we received The Jefferson Award for Public Service in recognition of our record for spurring volunteerism among our nerds and throughout the web development community with the webchallenge. In the first three years of The Nerdery Overnight Website Challenge, volunteers have donated approximately a million dollars worth of professional services to 39 nonprofits.

The Jefferson Award was created in 1962 by Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, Senator Robert Taft, Jr., and Sam Beard as a “Nobel Prize for public service.”

We promise not to let it go to our heads. Non-subscribers, you can read the whole article right here.

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Kinship/Dolan Media team at Nerdery Overnight Website Challenge from The Nerdery on Vimeo.

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MN Senior Corps & Rainbow Pony Cake from The Nerdery on Vimeo.

Said Catalyst Studios founder Jason Rysavy:

“MN Senior Corps connects thousands of seniors to volunteer opportunities across the state’s 4000+ partner locations. Their old website had very general information about the program and then a number to call or a form to fill out for more info. A Senior Corps employee would then find out which county they were hoping to volunteer in and connect them with the right person. It was a huge headache for them and the user.

“MN Senior Corps had some ideas on how to make this simple, but we took it a significant step forward. The main idea we brought to them was doing some geolocation to automatically find out which county a site visitor was in, bypassing any manual county look up or searching. Our thought was simple. We can figure out where they are…so let’s save a step and tell them. Once we all knew that was going to solve the main issue MN Senior Corps was having, we looked for other hopes and dreams they had. We found that they had tons of great volunteer stories from seniors across the state, from every county. We learned that they had nowhere to display these stories. So we created a tool to add stories to the site and admin tools to select stories to approve for public viewing on the site…giving them the option to randomly display them across the site, or let them set specific stories on specific pages.

“In the design process, we also gave them a new identity. We also came up with a tagline and wrote nearly all the copy for the site. Overall, the design is all about ease of use, cutting down barriers and engaging a less tech-savvy population.”

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MSP Wordpress ninjas help DesignWise Medical at Nerdery Overnight Website Challenge from The Nerdery on Vimeo.

MSP WordPress meetings are free and open to the public; you need not be a developer to check it out from 6:30-9 p.m. Thursday. There’ll be a session on creating basic WordPress plugins. Please RSVP so we know how many pizzas to order.

Visitors: The Nerdery is open during construction, but please note that we’ve recently knocked down walls to liberate/occupy some much needed adjacent office space.

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Nerdery gets Quality of Life Award from The Nerdery on Vimeo.

MIA: the guy who came up with this now-award-winning idea is still stuck Paris due to a volcano with an unspeakable name.

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What could it be? Shshsh…let’s listen in:

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Nonprofits: April 23 is the application deadline for this year’s Social Entrepreneur’s Cup; winning it last year was RREAL’s Golden Ticket to the Overnight Website Challenge. Our offer stands for the nonprofit that wins this year’s Cup, so apply here.

Congrats to RREAL for making the most of their Golden Ticket. Kudos also to Power Ranger captain Jon Pettersson and special congrats to his productive teammate Jon Rexeisen, who – to resolve that other cliffhanger – did indeed become a father about a week after his team’s overnight success. Jon Rexeisen will lead Nerdery webinars this week on developing apps for the iPad (his other new baby). RSVP at http://nerdery.com/ipad.

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See Homeward Bound’s new website at http://hbimn.heroku.com/.

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Dakota Wicohan/Team Placeholder at Nerdery Overnight Website Challenge from The Nerdery on Vimeo.

RSVP here for our “Interactive on Impossible Deadlines” webinar next Thursday at 3:00 p.m. Central (we’re back on normal business hours), featuring Team Placeholder captain Reid Durbin (from Larsen) and other Nerdery Overnight Website Challenge vets.

OK, the previous blanket statement of thanks to the many Challenge supporters simply will not do. We’re gonna have to name names.

Competition is good, but judging such a competition could not have been easy – and for making tough choices in a timely yet thoughtful and gracious manner, we thank our judges:

• Christine Durand, communication director, Minnesota Council of Nonprofits
• Dan Grigsby, founder of Mobile Orchard and tech community organizer
• Bob Huff, head of LaBreche Branding
• Dana Nelson, executive director, GiveMN.org

We can’t sufficiently thank sponsors Benchmark Learning, LaBreche and ReliaCloud for supporting our nerdathon and its participants in their own meaningful ways. Benchmark Learning will donate training to nonprofits and give half-price rates to volunteer developers. They also hosted our pre-Challenge mixer, providing space (and beverages) for constructive speed dating. LaBreche, our frequent agency partner, joined us this year as an event sponsor and treated all the nonprofits to a pre-Challenge branding/interactive strategy session. VISI offered each nonprofit complimentary web hosting, including the option for its ReliaCloud service; they also provided each volunteer developer a $100 ReliaCloud credit.

We’d also like to send a shout out to all of our in-kind donors and meal sponsors who helped us to make sure that while participants may have been tired, at least they weren’t running on empty.

• Bruegger’s (five stores donated a combined 340 bagels)
• Buffalo Wild Wings (seven stores donated a combined 1,200 wings/countless potato wedges)
• Chipotle (two stores donated a combined 200 burritos)
• Cub (Minnetonka store donated gift card for groceries)
• Jimmy Johns (two stores donated a combined five sandwich trays)
• Kowalski’s (donated gift card for groceries)
• Peace Coffee (donated 25 pounds of coffee)
• Pizza Luce’ (donated 40 pizzas)
• Red Bull (donated five cases of canned sleep substitute)

These companies also supported The Challenge in their own unique ways:

• Adobe (prize donation of Flash Builder 3)
• Arthouse (generously stepped up w/swag-bag donations)
• GitHub (provided source code repositories)
• Flashbelt (prize donation, tickets to conference)
• Pilotvibe (pro-bono audio recording and editing for nonprofits/teams, including Dakota Wicohan)
• Telerik (donated Sitefinity ASP.NET CMS to .NERD team)
• Unwind Within (chair massages to revive weary workers)

We (the “royal we” of Mark Hurlburt and I) want to personally thank Nerdery founders Luke Bucklin, Mike Derheim, Mike Schmidt for having the vision to see how much good an event like this can do in our community, and having the faith to let us take time away from our “real” jobs to further our ongoing experiment of mixing the nerdy with the needy. Also, thanks for being there to make the first of many pots of coffee (Luke), making multiple food runs (Mike D) and a midnight run for more coffee creamer (Mike S). And, oh yeah, about 3,800 hours of professional web development services were freely given to 16 nonprofits last weekend because of your willingness to run with an idea (Hurlburt’s) that was (and remains) just mad enough to work.

In addition to having volunteers on five of 16 development teams and the aforementioned extras on-hand, The Nerdery also dispatched a band of volunteers who came (and many stayed) to help keep the event running as smoothly as possible. Thanks to Jessica Mogen, Matt Tonak, Jodi Chromey, David Kam, Annette Johnson, Ginger Sorvari Bucklin, Heidi Schmidt, Kai Esbensen, Kris Szafranski, Dave Bucklin, Theresa Dahlberg,  Brendan Beckham, Bruce Peterson, Simon Banks, Sara Tabor, Sonja Peterson, Bill Titler, Scott Spillman, Tony Webster and Merne Williams.

Our hosts at the U of M Continuing Education Conference Center deserve props for again letting us rock-star their fine facility, with particular thanks to Ken Gay, Mike Wybierala, Leslie Berry and Wendy Hanson.

The crescendo from the orchestra pit tells me I’ve rambled long enough, so thanks again, everyone – particularly anyone I’ve fool-heartedly forgotten.

On this blog, we’ll continue to post profiles of the finished sites created at The Nerdery Overnight Website Challenge, so stay tuned.

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Second of all, now that we’ve had a day to recover, it’s time to show you what some other people have posted the 2010 Overnight Website Challenge.

• Minnov8 Gang 71: At the Overnight Website Challenge.
• Full Court Press on participating in the webchallenge.
• Visi’s Video from the Challenge.
• Flickr Pool (with pictures of the fabulous mystery box and the answer to what was inside).
• Here’s another Flickr set featuring Team Praxis (the 2009 Winners).
• Happy to lose a night’s sleep.
• Team Ruby’s Homeward Bound site before and after.

Happy Go Lucky – Web Challenge 6+ hours left from Nathan Hein on Vimeo.

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