I was involved in the St. Louis Coders 4 Charities event this past weekend; I was part of the TURNERS team that is responsible with helping the Turning Point agency (Warren County Council Against Domestic Violence) create a website. You see, out of the 9 charitable organizations in C4C’s list, Turning Point was the only one that did not have a website.
It was an interesting project, and it allowed me to learn quite a bit of stuff. We recommended Webhost4life to be their webhost provider, asked them to register a domain name of their preference (www.turningpointdvs.com) , and we decided to use SiteFinity as the CMS for their site. All these legwork were done before the starting time on Friday, October 16th.
On the day of the event, we had a great turnout: over 50 volunteers showed up on that first night, of various expertises and skill levels. Kevin Grossnicklaus gave an opening statement and then teams were introduced and proceeded to get together with the agency’s contact person to discuss about the project to be done.
Assembla.com was gracious enough to donate to C4C a web workspace, which allows for bug tracking, source control (SubVersion using Tortoise and VisualSVN), team membership registration and file sharing of project assets. Most of Friday was used for familiarizing ourselves with the tools available and digging a bit deeper into the requirements side that each project needed.
My team had these great individuals as members:
It was a great experience for me altogether; it was amazing to see these volunteers (mostly developers, but we also have Project Managers, Testers, Graphics Artists, etc.) work until very late night, all for these charity organizations, with no rewards whatsoever. It is very, very eye-opening. We closed up on Friday around midnight, opened up again on Saturday from 7:30 AM, again all the way to around 11:30 PM.
We had a closing show-and-tell session on 5 PM Sunday; all of the projects are considered done in principal: some needed to still be uploaded to the webhost, some needed a bit of polish here and there, but the main requests of the project are done. The place was closed around 7:30 PM and everyone went home tired, but elated – it was also evident that people needed a good night’s sleep afterwards.
It was a great event, it benefitted quite a bit of the Greater St. Louis charity organizations, and I am overwhelmed by the outpouring of support from the St. Louis IT community. I’m sure we’ll have another one next year, so hopefully it’ll be even bigger and better than this time around 
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Pictures of the event can be found here. I still need to upload my pics, but I’ll add it to the pool.