Rails - Apr 2006 - Workshop for Good - May 20/21, Washington DC, $400, Benefitting Public High School

Hey Everyone,

I''ve been working on putting this project together for a few weeks now 
and it is finally coming together.  The "Workshop for Good" will take 
place Saturday and Sunday May 20th - 21st.  The cost is $400 for most 
people, but a discounted price of $200 for current high-school or 
undergraduate students (limit 5).  All proceeds will benefit the Cesar 
Chavez Public Charter High School, a small public high school in 
downtown Washington, DC.  Our goal is to raise $10,000 to improve access 
to and integration of technology throughout the curriculum.

It will be led by Amy Hoy (http://www.slash7.com), Ezra Zygmuntowicz 
(http://www.brainspl.at), and me, Jeff Casimir 
(http://www.casimircreative.com).  Between the three of us we have a 
good bit of experience and complementary specializations.  Ezra has 
experience in the "enterprise" arena and extensive knowledge about 
deployment, servers, and all that techie stuff (in fact he''s writing a 
book for the Pragmatic Programmers on the topic).  Amy has a really 
different take on things coming from a designer perspective and has a 
uniquely quirky style that sugar-coats her real expertise (and is 
another PragProg author in the making).  I, Jeff, am an experienced 
teacher first and an experienced Rails programmer second (though with no 
book deal!) and hope to help the three of us turn the expertise in our 
brains into a fun, interactive, and engaging educational experience.

The content is still being tweaked, but you can rest assured that there 
will be a lot of learning going on.  We''re targeting the beginning and 
intermediate Rails users.  I know many of you are above that level, but 
maybe you have friends or colleagues that would be interested.

At this point, we need the following:

1) Attendees!  One seat''s taken, 24 to go.
2) Blog Pimpage!  We''re trying to get the word out, please help.
3) Sponsorships!  Dave Thomas has graciously offered us copies of the 
Rails book which is totally awesome.  We would love to find additional 
sponsors who might be interested in covering things like: a) speaker 
transportation/hotel costs (~$800), b) lunches for everyone (~$600), c) 
door prizes (software? hosting? swag? etc), d) t-shirts (~$350), e) 
attendee happy-hour/dinner, e) other ideas.  In exchange I''ll be adding
"sponsor" links/icons to the website and will include them on any swag
that we create.
4) Other contributions?  If our idea is compelling and you''ve got 
something else to contribute please shoot me an email.

More information and developing news is available at the project website:

http://www.workshopforgood.org

Thanks for your time & support,
Jeff Casimir