Searched for : tsunami
A little over five years ago a whole pile of people, inspired by Julie Lerman, got together to raise money for the tsunami relief and recovery in Aceh. (Here are my blog entries from that time.) We raised over $10,000 and perhaps some of you were wondering if we made a difference. Well Stephen Forte, who was a big part of that effort, now lives nearby and he visited them. His update is a lovely way to see what happened as a result of our efforts. It's nice to see that the organization we chose to support is still there and still doing good work. I wish all my donations came with a five year followup like that.

Kate

Wednesday, April 07, 2010 11:20:35 PM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)  #    

Here's the link to the ebay auction featuring over 20 Tech Ed speakers, almost all RDs. It ends June 16th. Get your hour of consulting time and help the tsunami victims at the same time. If you have no idea what I'm talking about, wander back in time through this blog to January: we did an auction then and raised $10,000 for immediate relief. This time it's about recovery and our help is still sorely needed.

Whose time might you get?

  • Don Box (USA) Microsoft, Inc.
  • Jesper Johansson (USA) Microsoct, Inc.
  • Richard Campbell (Canada) Campbell and Associates.
  • Scott Hanselman (USA) Corillian, Inc.
  • Kimberly Tripp (USA) SQLSkills.com
  • Michele Leroux Bustamante (USA/Canada) iDesign, LLC
  • Kate Gregory (Canada) Gregory Consulting
  • Juval Lowy (USA) iDesign, LLC
  • Stephen Forte (USA) Corzen, Inc
  • Clemens Vasters (Germany) Newtelligence AG
  • Andrew Brust (USA) Citigate-Hudson, Inc.
  • Carl Franklin (USA) Franklins.net
  • Ingo Rammer (Austria) Thinktecture
  • Christian Weyer (Germany) Thinktecture
  • Joel Semeniuk (Canada) Imaginets
  • Rockford Lhotka (USA) Magenic Technologies
  • Patrick Hynds (USA) Critical Sites
  • Tim Landgrave (USA) Crowe, Inc.
  • Tim Huckaby (USA) Interknowlogy, Inc.
  • Jackie Goldstein (Israel) Renaissance
  • John Goodyear (USA) Aspsoft
  • Richard Hundhausen (USA) Accentient, Inc
  • Paul Sheriff (USA) PDSA, Inc

Not a dud in the bunch! Please help if you can by bidding right away: the more bids are in the system the higher the minimum bid.

Kate

Monday, June 06, 2005 5:26:23 PM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)  #    

Stephen Forte has posted a voluminous update that includes links to all our blogs and little bios of us all, in case there are one or two you haven't heard of. Check it out.

Kate

Saturday, January 22, 2005 12:43:24 PM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)  #    

Here's a blog entry by the surfers I mentioned yesterday explaining some of what they're up to and how desparately it's needed. And Julie has a delightful picture of them, too.

Julie is still getting our ducks in a row with EBay. As you can imagine, you can't just hold an auction and claim it's a fundraiser -- what a fraud opportunity.that would be! There are letters and faxes and suchlike to make sure that everybody is on the up and up. The good news is that because EBay and Paypal are doing this, you can be confident your money (you are going to bid, aren't you?) is going where we say its going. The bad news is I don't have an EBay link yet :-)

Kate

Friday, January 21, 2005 8:46:04 AM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)  #    

An absolutely stellar group of people, dubbed by Julie Lerman to be .NET Celebrities, have come together to offer up our tiny little bit of help for those whose lives, homes, loved ones, livelihoods, and dreams were washed away on Boxing Day of last year. The immediate “if we don't get fresh water in there they will all die” crisis is past, but there is so much rebuilding work to be done. The agency we've selected is Aceh Aid at IDEP which is local to Sumatra and has been on the ground since the waves hit. This is a nimble and creative group that, for example, teamed up with the surfing community to get boats into the worst hit places while large outside groups couldn't figure out how to reach them. It's going to be an EBay auction with payment through PayPal directly to a US foundation that supports IDEP -- that way for US-based people it will be tax deductible for sure. I am working on an answer for Canadians on that. Of course if your company spends the money to get the advice, then your company can deduct it as an expense, just the same as if you wrote me a cheque for my time.

There are 25 of us up for auction. Top bidder gets their pick of Jeffrey Richter, John Robbins, Jeff Prosise, Michele Leroux Bustamante, Jonathan Goodyear, Andrew Brust, Richard Campbell, Adam Cogan, Malek Kemmou, Jackie Goldstein, Goskin Bakir, Hector M Obregon, Patrick Hynds, Fernando Guerrero, Kate Gregory, Joel Semeniuk, Scott Hanselman, Barry Gervin, Clemens Vasters, Jorge Oblitas, Stephen Forte, John Lam, Deborah Kurata, Ted Neward and Kathleen Dollard. Wow! (And like I need to link to their blogs -- you know who these people are!) Most are friends of mine already, 18 are RDs, 5 are Canadian, all are top notch .NET stars who know their stuff and are in the habit of solving problems for people.

So what we are auctioning is one hour of mentoring. Phone, IM, email, whatever. (We won't fly out to you.) If you're the top bidder, you get whoever you want from that list. Second bidder chooses from the still stellar list remaining. And so on.

Most of us are consultants so you could theoretically buy our time. But that's in theory. My firm doesn't take one hour jobs. We don't really like to take one day jobs. Our preference for mentoring work is to take a $5000 retainer and let you know when you've used most of it up and need to send more. (We make exceptions for some work that's really technically interesting and fun, but we still need to be confident it will go on for a while.) I expect it's a similar situation for the others. That means we're offering something you otherwise couldn't buy. I want you to keep that in mind, then go bid more (a lot more) than you think an hour of my time is worth. The money goes to those who need it, you get a deduction, and you get some important business problem solved. Can't fail!

I'll post a link to the auction as soon as it's live.

Kate

Thursday, January 20, 2005 10:17:23 AM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)  #