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Saving the World... 3 websites at a time
RefreshIndy giving back to the community
The weekend of January 15-17, 2010 was a long one for a group of young professionals in Indianapolis. For 48 hours, there was little sleep, lots of excitement and heavy focus on just one thing: websites. While most of Indianapolis buzzed high and loud for the Colts, a group of Indianapolis-based web designers and developers spent two days building three websites for local charities. Under the umbrella of RefreshIndy, these individuals gave up their weekend to bring a new internet face to three non-for-profits.
RefreshIndy is a group of web designers and developers who meet up monthly to discuss and help improve the Indianapolis web community. The “3 sites in 48 hours” idea was the product of Justin Harter, founder of RefreshIndy. With many local charities being hit hard due to the recent economic downturn, which has made more people in need of help and less people donating time and/or money, Justin decided to utilize the Indianapolis web talent connected to RefreshIndy for the good of the community.
The event started on Friday, January 15 at 6pm and ended on Sunday, January 17 at 6pm, with most volunteers only sleeping a few hours to meet their objective. The charities being featured at this event are all local, self-sustaining ones, who were in need of websites to help promote their organizations to those who might need it the most. Those charities are:
Talbot House; a residential care facility for adult male recovering from alcoholism and substance abuse.
Progress House; a recovery center for alcohol and/or drug dependent men.
My Sister’s Place; a service providing transitional support and resources for formerly incarcerated and at-risk women and their families.
Each site was built in teams of 4 or 5 web developers and designers. Two of the teams utilized Drupal as their content management system (CMS) and one utilized Joomla. All teams achieved the primary target of creating a dynamic website for each charity. Whereas one team experienced hosting problems that took a few days to fix, all three sites are now online.
Throughout the 48 hour web-a-thon, the cameras were rolling for supporters to watch the developers work and ask questions. Streamlining video of the event allowed who ever wished to watch a group of diverse talent overcome many obstacles and create something dynamic out of nothing in a very short time frame.
This event was a success not because of one person, but due to the collective skills brought by many different individuals and organizations involved. Web Easy Media’s Co-founder Aaron Dudenhofer was a team leader of one of the Drupal groups and the company’s project manager, Ryan Ours, was a key contributor to the other Drupal group. Squish provided two skilled web developers; Nicki Laycoax and George Roots. Mark Allsop from Mallsop Website Solutions, Ryan Shrum from Cassis and Multimedia Specialist at Ball State University Jessica Seaton were also key contributors. Besides professional talent, students got involved as well, learning while helping this charitable cause. Those students are Kyle Heron, David Poindexter, Pat Proctor, Sean Donelson, Christian Schlensker, Tony Prizevoits and Greg Oppman.
In 48 hours, three charities were given a new face on the internet. The collective power of talented individuals coming together for a noble cause took what is normally a two month per site time period and shrunk it to one long weekend. The web professionals who made this event possible in some sense are competitors. On this particular weekend, though, the only business on the table was giving back to the Indianapolis community.
