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.

We need a FAQ for "new to GiveCamp" basics. This would include things as simple as "Yes, we'll feed you all weekend long, even vegetarians" to a more detailed "General flow of the event" to "How not to burn yourself out", "What to do if your team isn't working out", "What to do if you finish early", "How to ask for help if your team is missing a skillset", "What does your project lead do for you", and so on. There should probably be one for Devs/Designers, one for Leads, and one for NPO reps.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

Have a person to lead everyone in stretches at set times through out the day, This way people get away from their computers for just a moment and might feel a little less run down by Sunday afternoon.

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.

Every team should have a graphic designer. A lot of the non-profits end up needing a logo, so more designers with branding experience would be helpful. It's not just coding and functionality with these projects. Design/color/font decisions are being left to technical people and the non-profits who don't always know what they're doing or know what they want...and I've heard it from them directly. Stronger visuals are going to push these projects to another level and leave more of an impact with the non-profits' audiences.

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

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...

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!

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.

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?

Project leads should have earlier contact with technical resources. Working with technology I wasn't familiar with, I was too dependent upon techs that clearly didn't understand the technology they claimed to understand. This was on me to identify and remedy, but until Sunday morning they claimed to be ontrack with their assignments, only to decide unilaterally they couldn't deliver what was expected. With such short time frames, I would have benefited from pre-camp time discussing their past efforts, and getting a better handle on their comfort levels with the work proposed.

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?

Develop a set of "So you're a project lead..." type guides/spec sheets recommending approaches for different types of projects (web site, database, etc) including questions to ask, tech decision tree guides, and so on.

For example, Friday night could be "Define the Project," "Assess Your Team's Skills" and maybe "Shop for Talent"... Saturday AM could be "Assignments and First Milestones," or whatever. Turns out that just jumping in and hitting the keys *might not* be the best way to run a project!

We got a call at 4pm the Friday GiveCamp started from the tech person at the non-profit who had just found out about the project. Well before GiveCamp, we should have found out about the infrastructure they already had to host or had a dev environment and testing environment setup. We spent half of Saturday getting this working just so we could code and test. It was not done earlier because we hadn't been matched to our non-profit early enough and the email about servers available was far too late