Category: General News

I have been all-consumed by my day job. This is always a rough time of year here, but this year more than ever. Instead of working the 75-80% I signed up for in October, I'm at about 250%. (Ask Jessica, I do not exaggerate.)

While this is slowing down new features at Charitocracy, it isn't impacting the day-to-day operations. I automated almost everything, and I'm delighted to see it chugging along without my intervention. Not as delighted as I'd be if I could get in there and tinker every week, but still proud of the great causes you're all nominating and voting for in my "absence."

Tonight we'll choose another winning cause, and it's a hot contest! So if you haven't voted yet, or you'd like to change your vote last minute, go nuts! Tomorrow will be a new month, and as always we're excited to see which new causes you'll surface.

Don't worry, I'll eventually be back with a vengeance.

Just a heads up on a tiny little update to the rules regarding tiebreakers: if the stars align and multiple causes have

1. the same number of votes from
2. the same number of voters and
3. the same number of likes...

... then the first of them to have been nominated wins. First come first served.

I had to make this rule up on the fly last night. I received an email just after 1am reporting that the Vote page wasn't listing any causes any more. (Thanks, Stephanie!) I checked my server logs, and sure enough there it was, the result of the Top 10 selection process:

tie for votes AND voters *AND* likes!
need quadruple-tiebreaker?!

So I chose a 4th criterion that cannot result in yet another tie, since two causes cannot be nominated at the same time; one of them will make it into the database first. And that one will edge out any others with the same number of votes, voters, and likes.

For example, let's say there's a cause called The Nature Conservancy and another called St. Jude Children's Research Hospital, and both are vying for 10th position in the Top 10. Let's also say, hypothetically, that as of midnight both have 2.5 votes from 3 voters and 7 likes. That's when a friend emails you that your server's broken, and you spend from 1am to 2am fixing the voting criteria, and St. Jude, nominated just 3 days before The Nature Conservancy as it would turn out, secures its spot in the Top 10 for March.

Usually I make my own memes. But this one I found on an old blog post about NCAA March Madness was too perfect and timely as-is. (Now pardon me, I have to go Pimp My Charity some more.)

Jessica and I are excited to announce our three new Charitocracy board members for 2017!

David Haas has over 25 years of innovation, sales, marketing, product development and business development expertise in the Digital Media, Event Technology, Social Media and Experiential Event marketplaces. David’s current focus is launching new technology products for FreemanXP and building personal development apps.

Melia Wilkinson spent a majority of her professional career working in marketing, sales and PR, but it's her earlier roles in non-profit that will be most valuable for this role. Melia worked in marketing and events in DC for a lobby group working to educate on the state of children (re: hunger and poverty) as well as on microenterprise. Learning how to stretch a dollar, motivate members and educate are the cornerstones to getting a non-profit off the ground, and Melia looks forward to rolling up her sleeves and getting back into it.

Mike Andrews started programming computers more than 30 years ago, and never stopped. Along the way, he created many legendary bugs, and a few tidy solutions to complex problems in filesystems, distributed computing, computer audio, and block storage. He was awarded two patents for network filesystem technologies. Mike brings a proven background in project management and a fierce sense of humor to the task of chipping away at the world's mountain of injustices with Charitocracy.

We thank Dave, Melia, and Mike for their priceless feedback even before joining the board, and look forward to their continued guidance in the year ahead. Boardom has never been so fun. Well, unless you count when the boardroom was our bedroom. But I guess Charitocracy is becoming all respectable now!