If you weren't paying attention to the #teamjs hashtag on Twitter on Friday, you missed out on a lot of excitement and a great JavaScript community moment. If you were part of the fun, then you probably know all this already, and should see TeamJS Update and What's Next instead.
TeamJS is a group of JavaScript programmers and other web developers who are raising money for Feeding America as part of the Mozilla Firefox Challenge.
The Mozilla Firefox Challenge is a celebrity fundraiser, sponsored by Mozilla. Mozilla got 12 celebrities involved, donated $5,000 to their favorite cause and asked the celebrities to compete to raise more money through CrowdRise for that cause. Whichever charity raises the most money before January 11th will win an additional $25,000 from Mozilla.
But the competition isn't limited to the initial 12 celebrities: there are no celebrities behind TeamJS, and we didn't get any seed money from Mozilla. TeamJS started off as a lark to see whether the JavaScript and web developer community could donate some money and get the black-on-yellow JavaScript logo on the leaderboard among the celebrities faces.
But then something amazing happened! On Friday morning Chris Williams, the big-hearted organizer of JSConf (JavaScript's premiere conference) donated $5000 on behalf of JSConf. That put us on an even playing field with the celebrities and, when combined with donations from Wednesday and Thursday, it catapulted us into the middle of the pack.
That seed money opened the floodgates and the money began to pour in. When I left the office Friday evening, TeamJS was in second place. When I got home, we were first. The evening ended with another big $1,000 donation from Jupiter Consulting that brought us close to $11,000 in total donations. We were no longer just in first: we had a $2,000 lead and had left the celebrities in our dust. (As I write this Sunday night, we have raised $12,211 and second place is Sophia Bush with $9,990.)
It was a really amazing day, but what it means is that this is no longer a lark: we could actually win this contest. Please join us and let's make this an amazing week!
Read more about our charity, Feeding America and give whatever you can at the TeamJS page.
@__DavidFlanagan
The amazing thing is that the celebrity-backed fundraisers started with $5000 from the celerities, which TeamJS didn't.