Last weekend, Lisa and I took off Friday to attend Philly Give Camp. The Camp-type unconference is held to provide technical expertise and work to nonprofit groups. I first heard about the event through coworkers at Wharton, and I decided to sign up. I told some friends about it, and got Kosal and an ex-coworker from ABC, Jonathan to come as well.

I sometimes think about how great my life has been, and how fantastic it is now, and I’m disappointed in myself that I haven’t given much back. Philly Give Camp provided an opportunity to use the skills that I so love towards a noble goal. That’s one of the reasons I decided to sign up. The Give Camp was held at Microsoft’s Malvern office, where they do mostly sales, in a complex shared with other companies. There’s a fountain in the shared lobby with plenty of parking outside. In the lobby of the office, there were plush couches, along with a Guitar Hero setup. They have small offices across from their primary conference rooms that they call “Chat Rooms.”

Lisa and I went around 11AM that morning but there wasn’t much to do. We helped Dani retrieve Give Camp T-shirts from his car, and list all of the available projects on two large whiteboards. We were the first there (along with Kosal) so Dani Diaz, who organized the event, let us choose a project to work on. We chose to work on an application for Mission for Educating Children with Autism (MECA) which sounded like the most challenging project.

We had lunch at King of Prussia mall while Dani was busy shopping. When we returned, there were several developers already there. We waited for more people to arrive. Soon Trevor came, who I had met recently at Philly ETE and who I knew was a frequent attendee at Philly RB meetings. We decided to work together on the MECA project.

Our meeting with the MECA staff is described in the next post.