This weekend the New England Give Camp is being held at the N.E.R.D Center in Cambridge Mass. Myself and Matthew Miller are attending and offering our respective technological expertise and comical relief. The event started last night (Friday, June 11th) and kicked off with a brief introduction and overview of the event by Jim O'Neil followed by introductions of all the non-profit organizations and technical/non-technical volunteers. After a very interesting presentation by Joselin Mane titled Levaraging Social Media all of the volunteers were assigned to their specific weekend projects.

There were a lot of interesting non-profits that had signed up for the event and we were lucky enough to get assigned the Lawrence Youth Soccer group. This organization not only introduced the town of Lawrence Mass. to the sport of soccer (or as the European part of me would say: football) but it has kept on expanding and now includes three travel teams of which two have reached the playoffs! I also find it very fitting that we were assigned to this group since the World Cup started only yesterday, so what better way to celebrate than to create a website for a group aspiring to create future World Cup players! Of course watching all of the World Cup games that are playing this weekend is just research for the project ;)

Night #1 was mostly getting introduced to the rest of the group (mostly technical volunteers but we have also have a graphical designer) as well as the project we are working on. You can see a general shot of some of the groups starting the planning phase below:

And here is our group hard at work discussing requirements:

After this get-together the group decided to retire for the evening and meet up again the next morning. Bakers' Best brought us some delicious breakfast to help fuel the marathon of planning and coding that is coming up:

I'm very excited to be working on this project over the weekend and by Sunday afternoon the Lawrence Youth Soccer group should have a new spiffy site to work with :)