Geeks 4 Good jam

So yesterday I went to the Geeks 4 Good Jam. I got an invite on Facebook from an old classmate of mine. I was eager to reconnect with her and also get some leads on good projects I could work on. The event was about letting developers know of organizations that can use tech help to do good things. I am an Eagle Scout, so doing volunteer work is something that I am used to, and I am sad to say that I have not been doing any lately. This seemed like a great opportunity for me.

Presentations

I arrived a bit late and missed the first speaker. He was talking about working at a hospital, or doing something in the health care industry? I don't know. He had a link on his slides to github but I went there and didn't see any information about an organization. Not clear how I could help.

Other presenters were ChickTech, Coder Dojo, Social Coding 4 good, SF Public Press, and Coders For America (?). They all seemed really cool. I don't know if I could really contribute to ChickTech since they focus on high school girls. Could I really make a difference, as a guy, if I mentored a young girl? It seemed that they got the most out of having adult females give advice to the girls. The other orgs seemed interesting, but had vague goals and it wasn't clear if I could really help out.

Outcome

I chatted with the guy from Coder Dojo about their "mentor" system. At Coder Dojo, a mentor is mostly just an experienced developer who can help kids with projects and lessons that are planned out by a teacher. It seems that any mentor can become a teacher after a short while, so there is no big process around it. After talking to him, it seemed like the kind of thing that is within my abilities and could also do some good. I gave the guy my name and email but he has not contacted me yet. If I don't hear from him in a while I initiate contact on my own.

I also talked to the lady from Social Coding 4 Good. At first I was skeptical that their service was just a CraigsList for free programmers. But she gave me a lot of details and I got the feeling that she personally knows the organizations and projects that they promote on the site. I have not yet signed up there but I plan to. It seems that only about 10% of the people who sign up ever get around to working on a project, but hey I could be one of those 10%!

I didn't have much time to talk to the person who invited me. I was surprised that she was one of the organizers of the Jam, not just passing along invitations on Facebook! We gave vague statements to seeing each other again, I hope we do.