The Resource Center of the Americas is a non-governmental, 501 (c)(3) organization that informs, educates and organizes to promote human rights, economic justice, democratic participation, and cross cultural understanding in the context of globalization in the Americas.

Jason and Stephanie from the Resource Center joined our team for the challenge. They are the only two employees of the Resource Center and they used to have over 30. They once occupied an entire building of which now they only take up one room in the basement. I was more than happy to contribute to their new website.

The new and improved Resource Center of the Americas website

It goes without saying that time management is crucial. We fell into a pattern of regular little meetings. Everyone would give a synopsis of what they had worked on and what they were going to work on next. This worked fairly well. A lot of times other little pow-wows would break out too. It was fairly interesting just watching all the teams work. There wasn’t a whole lot of mingling and I think the final results from each team showed why. We pushed ourselves.

The Ruby.mn team was great. We spent the first 3-4 hours getting to know what Jason and Stephanie’s needs were and trying to prioritize them into things we could accomplish in 24 hours. Jason was formerly in IT, so he was familiar with things like HTML and SQL. It was immensely helpful to have another geek on the team. Stephanie was also a big help with testing and data entry.

From the word go, Nate and Kim buried their heads in a new design. Kim came up with the stylish new logo. I like that she kept the upside down globe. Nate spent most of the first half of the event putting together what you see above.

We developers had decided on Radiant CMS prior to the event and had explored a few extensions. It seemed most every nonprofit wanted some kind of blog or current events area, a calendar, a way to take donations online, and maybe a couple other specialized features. Our nonprofit holds Spanish classes and sells Spanish books. Something we didn’t expect to do was sell things. I think we came up with a solution that will work now for them and it’s something they can expand into in the future if they want to. It also happened to be the Paypal portion of the site that gave us the most pain. It momentarily took our two of our developers at about 4 in the morning.

This was the only sleep any of our 12 team members had and these guys were only down for about 15 minutes.

Listing of upcoming events were someting we identified as a priority. The Resource Center host’s a coffee hour once a week and also publicizes other community events. My role early on was bringing Flickr integration into Radiant so we could build an image gallery. In addition, they will be able to insert Flickr image into their new event listings. I ran into a bit of trouble when the first extension I chose to use simply refused to pull any images into Radiant. I gave up after a couple hours of manually executing json calls to Flickr. Luckily, I found another extension which used flickr_fu on the back end. It turns out Radiant has page caching built in, so the API hits to Flickr will be minimal.

By early evening, Nate had finished the homepage design and handed it over to me to slice and turn into HTML. He was pretty happy to have me do it as last year, I guess he was forced to do both the design and the HTML. I spent the next 5 hours between Photoshop, Firefox, Textmate, and Terminal. I barely looked up. This is where most of the time disappeared for me. I put on my headphones and just zoned in.

Heads down programming at f1webchallenge.com

I had the shell, header, and navigation done fairly quickly. The main body of the page got fairly complex especially since the backend was evolving as I worked. At about 2AM I had the sidebar area and the 3 content areas at the bottom all finished. After that, I was helping Nate integrate the sub-page templates he designed into the CMS. The tear across the middle of the page came together somewhere between 3-4AM. Andy Atkinson (@webandy), John Reilly (@johnreilly) and I attacked the drop-down menus for the navigation. We were able to come up with a CSS+JS solution that should work in all modern browsers. I was impressed with myself. John ran into some roadblocks with the CSS as I was doing some other work on the homepage and I miraculously was able to hack out the fixes in Firebug in about 10 minutes. The final hours of the challenge were spent mostly cleaning up CSS and styling pages as they were created.

The rest of our team worked on a translation to Spanish module so the whole site could be translated. The Donation system was hooked in and a store was created with integration with Paypal. We weren’t able to deliver a custom mailing list with user management to them because we simply did not have the time. It was a frantic dash at the end, but the team held together well. In the end, District 202, a haven for GLBT teens and their team Praxis won out. Dan Grigsby told me via twitter that the decision was tough, but with the features the winning site had, it would impact real lives the most. There was a private, real time, chat feature and a private Ning social network was integrated to give the members a safe place to hang out online. In the end, I think it was said 2,800 hours of service were put in amounting to roughly $300,000 of free professional quality work.

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Update: There is a group pool on Flickr containing a ton of photos from the event. My teammate Andy Atkinson also wrote a short synopsis of his experience.

The F1 Web Challenge is a charity event where teams of developers and designers are paired with a nonprofit and are given 24 hours to build the nonprofit a website. The catch is that pairings aren’t announced before the start of the event and those 24 hours are consecutive. Crazy? Maybe. Fun? Definitely. Worth it? Absolutely.

Last spring I remember seeing some tweets about the event and I thought it was a really cool idea. Having worked for a nonprofit  myself at one point, I knew that they often lack the personnel, funds, and knowhow to pull off a great website themselves. So when the call went out on the local Ruby user’s mailing list, I jumped at the chance and found a spot on the Ruby.mn team.

I’ve been more than impressed with the people on my team. Within weeks of the team forming, we had 2 sponsors; Github and Tightrope Media Systems. Our sponsors really helped push our team up above the rest. With the funds donated by TRMS, we were able to purchase hosting for our team website, hosting for the nonprofit, and team t-shirts. Github provided us with a repository for our team website and the nonprofit. Thanks to Sam Schroeder for talking to Github and thanks to John Reilly for talking to his boss at TRMS.

I couldn’t let John and Sam be the only ones to step up for the team. I assumed the role of t-shirt designer even though I’d never done any t-shirt design before. With some help from one of last year’s team members and some feedback from the group, I was able to put a design together. I was happy with what I was able to come up with and I’m anxious to see how the finished product turned out. At the very least, we’ll look like a team!

It is my plan to tweet, live blog, and take photos throughout the day and night. I’m hoping to make a few posts here tomorrow. Follow me (@jrmehle) and @webchallenge on Twitter. Watch my Flickr stream for photos. FriendFeed aggregates all of the previously mentioned content sources, so that would be a place to watch too. Who knows, I may end up with Ustream account at some point to live-stream the event too. The festivities kick off at 9AM and will run through 9AM on Sunday.