While there is always room for improvement, please know that this was an extremely well run event. We all appreciate that. There was strong organization, the food was excellent, the O'Reilly books were awesome, the prizes were amazing. Communication was solid: email, twitter, facebook, web site. All kinds of extra touches were evident (gourmet coffee, sundaes, popcorn, incredible goodie/swag bags, t-shirts, ...). You thought of nearly EVERYTHING. Thank you for such diligence and care.

A few of us received our team leader assignments and were asked to contact the charities. The charities were surprised that we were calling them again to prep for the weekend, and team leaders were suprised that the charities had already been contacted.

I know this is challenging to get right - matching soft skills, tech skills, team experience, and charity needs. As possible, consider assigning team leaders on a rolling basis as good fits are found.

Include details around how to have it be "auto-managed" such as from their web site. Charities are stressed enough for time - and can use all the automation they need.

Change the amount of tickets you have for signing up from just the 100 tickets to
70 developers, 30 designers (or something among those lines). We really lacked designers this year but the ones we had were amazing.

The short video that catching joy had was great. If you can get some profesional video production assets to volunteer would be great. Short videos would add value to these projects!

Nice to have a place for developers to register to help other charity organization out of GiveCamp and they dont have to wait for the whole year to get there task completed.

We had a couple reoccurring needs for short overviews of key topics this weekend. We should have a track of 'bootcamp' type workshops that the non-profit workers (or anyone can attend) like:
SEO Basics, Constant Contact, PayPal, Intro to Drupal, Into to Wordpress, Registering domains, Hosting Service providers and options...

I'd volunteer to draw up a suggested series of workshops to bring a noob into the fold...

Have an official "quiet time" where people are asked to be aware that many of their fellow campers are recharging for the next day of hacking. To pick a random hypothetical example, this would serve to discourage use of, say, noisy electric pumps at 3:00 AM which might wake up most of the tired campers within a 50' radius (and cause those that didn't wake up to dream about vacuum cleaners).

Some charities produce content. Depending on their missions, they may benefit from deliberate use of certain Creative Commons licensing. Also, many will benefit from knowing how to (fairly and correctly) reuse Creative Commons-licensed content released by others - for example, as a source of images for their web sites or brochures.

The Dreamhost issue caused several projects to stall. It would be beneficial have servers on-site to house the projects. Virtual machines would do the trick, so that LAMP or Windows Machines could be built.

I was able to connect with my nonprofit ~1 week before GiveCamp, which was just enough time to discover a different approach/solution was required. We managed to get 5 stories into the backlog to that end, but another week would have be very, very useful.

I only found out about the conference last minute and would have preferred to receive a reminder email vs. monitoring twitter. Aware of spam sensitivity, can we have an opt in mailing list?

Not a big fan of hot beverages, so iced coffee / tea would have been good.

Inform nonprofits of the time commitment when they apply. This was not clear during the process. I'm still not sure if I needed to be there every day or just a few hours. Is it possible to communicate via email and Skype for those that cannot be on site the entire weekend? Or does someone from the nonprofit need to be there in person?

I know I was brain fried by the time presentations came around. I'd love to be able to see the roster of all the projects accomplished with click throughs to any that are publicly viewable, all from one location

Techs needing to be reassigned should be made available Friday Night and/or posted by 7AM on Sat. Coming in at 9ish on Sat AM means replanning or a casual shuffle which looses detail.

Those of us outside the main room were a bit out of the loop on workshops. The onus should have been on us to seek them out, but time does get away from one. A few easels or other BIG visible postings of the schedule would have been good.

In the application/instructions, Give Camp should make it clear that a single authorized non-profit decision maker should be in attendance for essentially the entire weekend. This should not be a surprise to them.

For those charities that are using CMS systems, such as WordPress or Drupal, it would be nice to have lists of plugins that are useful and recommended for Non-Profits. Since noone on our team was proficient with the CMS we used, we spent a surprising amount of time searching for quality plugins.
I imagine common ones might be for social media integration, donate buttons, contact us forms, seo, etc.

It seems that the assignments were primarily by head count. If a team has a PM and a PM Shadow assigned, they shouldn't count as techies. Some teams had 3-4 techies assigned, where we only had 1 techie, a Technical Lead, a PM and a PM shadow..... rather light on skills.