It's been a week now since our two teams from Pariveda volunteered at the We Are Microsoft event. Toi Wright and Chris Koenig did a great job organizing the event.
My team which had Jeff Townes, Justin Finch and Kyle Stock from Pariveda and Amy Stewart from Stewart Design was assigned to Texas CARES, a cat rescue group here in North Texas. Beyond some initial phone discussions where we worked through logistics and timing for the weekend, we started out with a clean slate on Friday evening.
Over the course of two and half days, we developed a revamped website with a searchable and maintainable database for managing rescued cats and helping pair them up with adoptive owners.
To see the improvement, here's a link to their current site. Here's a link to the new site (in beta as we work through transferring domain registration). Here's a link to the interview that Geeks with Blogs did with Carol Benassi, the president of Texas CARES and me, and here's another link to the interview they did with the Texas Response Unit Search and Rescue (the second Pariveda team).
One of the things that makes Pariveda unique is that we have an expectation that all of our folks participate in community service. Depending upon the person's level (it increases the higher up you go), there are a certain number of hours that are expected you commit to community service. We Are Microsoft was a great way to be able to help our community by doing the things that we do best- develop great software.
We each spent around 40 hours between Friday night until late Sunday afternoon. It took us a while to recover, but I was extremely proud of both teams. By the way, our two teams from Pariveda came in First and Third in the competition-- Woo Hoo!
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