Enjoy the video below recapping the first half of the Overnight Website Challenge. The night is still young…

Keep up-to-date in real-time by following the Twitter hashtag #webchallenge.

I arrived on the scene to find a slew of 160 energetic web developers buzzing around, some typing code as quickly as their fingers could handle and others animatedly telling jokes to their fellow web nerds. I say nerds in a positive way. The Overnight Website Challenge refers to the web developers who have donated their time for this cause as “an army of nerds”, while in the same context, media sources have described the event as “the nerdy helping the needy”. After all, the company who created the entire theory behind the Challenge is called Nerdery Interactive Labs.

These 160 web developers, split into 16 equal teams of 10, will transform the websites of 16 local nonprofit organizations over the course of 24 hours at the cost of a good night’s sleep. These generous developers have been supplied with a plethora of food, and more importantly, energy drinks.

The paired teams of developers and nonprofits are:

Pollywog Stew and Minnesota Jaycees
Polymorphine Power Rangers: Global Warming and Rural Renewable Energy Alliance
Ruby.MN and Homeward Bound
MSP WordPress and DesignWise Medical Incorporated
ArcStone Super Squad and Minnesota Association for Children’s Mental Health
Team Placeholder and Dakota Wicohan
Myths, Mysteries, and Legends and World Savvy
Bold Italic Outline Shadow and MORE: Multicultural School for Empowerment
Happy Go Lucky Robot Fun Time and Redwood Area Communities Foundation
5 Men, 4 Women, and an Animal and Kinship of Greater Minnesota
Praxis and Child Protection International
Web Monkeys and Restorative Justice Community Action
.NERD and Common Ground
Rainbow Ponycake and Minnesota Senior Corps Association
The JWT League of Embetterment and Centro Campesino
Ratchet and The Bloomington Chorale

Stay tuned for video footage of the event!

The Overnight Website Challenge, sponsored by ReliaCloud, has begun!  Watch Mark Malmberg with The Nerdery report it live as interviewed by Kare11.

In just one day, 18 hours and counting, The Nerdery’s third annual Overnight Website Challenge will be underway. Sixteen nonprofit organizations within the Twin Cities have been chosen to have their websites completely revamped within a period of 24 hours – in a row! 160 website developers have agreed to donate their time and talent for this worthy cause.

The festivities will kick off at 8:00am on Saturday with bagels, coffee, and Red Bull when the countdown officially begins. An organized mess of computers, cables, energy drinks, and web nerds will take over the Continuing Education Conference Center at the University of Minnesota. This army of sleep-deprived developers will work continuously until the giant clock strikes 9:00am the next morning.

ReliaCloud is proud to sponsor the Challenge. As a thank you to the nonprofits involved, we have given each of them the opportunity to utilize our cloud servers for free for an entire year.

Keep up with the action on the ReliaCloud Blog as we post video of the Challenge throughout the night.

For the third year in a row, The Nerdery has issued a call to all web developers to help nonprofit organizations with their websites. For the third year in a row, ReliaCloud has answered that call by providing a year’s worth of free cloud hosting for each of the non-profits so they can focus their funds on what they do best.

Overnight Website Challenge

The “Overnight Website Challenge” is described perfectly by its name — a challenge in which teams of web developers spend 24 hours straight turning non-profit websites into works of art. The clock starts the morning of March 20th and goes straight through until the morning of the 21st when time runs out.

The deadline to apply is January 8th. Nonprofits apply for the Overnight Website Challenge by articulating their interactive needs and vision of how ten web pros could – in 24 hours – help make them work smarter online, further their mission, and better serve their community. Volunteers apply by creating teams of programmers, designers, and project managers to help get the job done.

Be on the lookout for further updates on the Overnight Website Challenge as we come closer to the date. If you have web skills you would like to offer, be sure to register to be part of a team.