Malek's Moorish tales - Buy an hour of consulting time and help the Tsunami Victums of Banda Aceh

	Friday, January 21, 2005

Buy an hour of consulting time and help the Tsunami Victums of Banda Aceh

A group of us RDs, MVPs, .NET experts, trainers and consultants, including very famous .NET community figures are going to auction an hour of consulting time for the benefit of Tsunami victims of Banda Aceh. The iniiative, championed by Julia Lerman and Stephen Forte will go live soon. The participants include:

Michelle Leroux Bustamante (Das Blonde, the Interop Worriors princess), Kimberly L. Tripp (Sql Hera, Anti-Suckiness club member), Jonathan Goodyear(Angry Coder), Andrew Brust (The most quoted .NET expert), Richard Campbell (Toy Boy), Adam Cogan (Office Development Guru), Goksin Bakir (Yoda, the JIT Speaker,Anti-Suckiness club member), Jackie Goldstein (Author and very active community leader), Ted Neward (Mountain of worthy information), Kathleen Dollard(GenDotNet), Hector M Obregon, Patrick Hynds (Tech Seige, the smartest man I know and he still has a life), Fernando Guerrero (Solid Quality Learning), Kate Gregory (Great Kate, and C++ is still alive and well), Joel Semeniuk (not work burnout, simply enjoying Team System), Scott Hanselman (ComputerZen or the nicest person on the face of the earth), Barry Gervin (Not lost and still having great fun with triangulations and Map Point), Clemens Vasters ( Enterprise Development & Alien Abductions, Das Blog, Proseware, hundreds of talks, and still disposed to give you a liberal interpretation of "1" hour,Anti-Suckiness club member) , Jorge Oblitas (No, Pisco isn't part of the auction deal, just very serious consulting time), Stephen Forte (Your money goes to the tsunami victims, but the love letters still go to Steven,Anti-Suckiness club member), Jeffrey Richter, John Robbins and Jeff Prosise (Wintellect).

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Who this auction is to benefit?

In the long run, the auction is to benefit the people of Aceh Province, Sumatra, who have had their island destroyed and lost nearly 100,000 of their people. The waves may be gone, but the devastation continues and the fear of many more dying from disease continues.

We are trying to help, by assisting Aceh Aid at IDEP, an organization that is local and doing amazing work.

There is an area on their website devoted to this work: www.idepfoundation.org/aceh_aid.html. (www.AcehAid.org will take you right to this page). I recommend that if you are interested in knowing who you are doing this for, you go peruse that website, read the updates, read about the volunteer search, etc.

Below is an explanation of IDEP and what they are doing.

WHAT IS IDEP?
IDEP is a small, Indonesian NGO, based in Ubud, Bali. Completed projects over the years have included community based development, sustainable living initiatives, permaculture training, waste management, organic gardens, recycling, etc. The focus is on helping people to help themselves. IDEP's founding director, Petra Schneider is a US-born, Indonesian citizen. The demonstrated and reproducible success of IDEP's small projects in local communities has earned the team an excellent reputation.

IDEP AND DISASTER RESPONSE/RELIEF/RECOVERY
At the time of the Bali bomb, about two years ago, IDEP was an important element of the network of local NGOs and other supporters that quickly responded to the tragedy, in various ways, not only immediately after the bomb, but during the recovery process for the various communities involved. Following shortly thereafter, IDEP received funding from USAid to create a comprehensive set of disaster management materials for Indonesian communities, aimed at children, families, and local leaders (official and unofficial). The materials are in the Indonesian language and suitable for use in rural and urban settings. These materials, including a booklet for children about Tsunami preparedness, were finished just weeks ago, but had not yet been disseminated to communities. Then the tsunami struck.

WHAT IS ACEH AID AT IDEP
Only hours after the news of the tsunami reached Bali, the same network of NGOs and individuals in Bali who had been involved in the relief efforts for the Bali bomb, reanimated and went into action. We started something called the "Aceh Aid Bucket Brigade" (see website), creating and deploying one-family-one-bucket multi-material aid packages from the hands of donors in Bali to the field in Sumatra. We began sending highly skilled volunteers, well-matched to the task within two days of the tsunami (Sam Schultz, Lee Downey, Oded Carmi and others). Our relief, and later, recovery programs in response to the Tsunami are now focused on two fronts. One is direct aid from Medan by road to areas around Banda Aceh. The other is this remarkable joint effort (nothing short of heroic), to the islands off the west coast of Sumatra, which as of yet, have not been receiving aid from any other channels that we know of.

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About the auction: We have 25 amazing consultants and trainers in this auction. Each person has donated one hour of consulting time, to be provided by email or phone (at expense of bidder). The consultant and winner are free to agree upon other arrangements. It will be an Ebay "multi-item" auction where all of the consultants are in the same auction. The top 25 bids will be the winners. The highest bidder will get first choice of which consultant they would like to work with. Payments will be made DIRECTLY to Aceh Aid at IDEP's PayPal account (acehaid@tides.org).

A note about multi-item auctions: Normally and EBay multi-item auction is set up to auction off identical items, such as hammers. Given that they are of equal value, the multi-item auction rules state that the winning bidders would each pay the amount of the lowest winning bid. The .NET Celebrity Auction for Aceh Aid at IDEP will not work this way. Since this is a charity auction, we expect the winning bidders to pay the amount of their final bid. Allowing bidders to select consultants based on their bid rank justifies this, but moreso, the fact that this is a charity auction justifies this.

A note about your tax-deductible contribution: All contributions will be made through a PayPal account that goes to Tides Foundation (www.tidesfoundation.org) which is a US-based 501c3 non-profit, permitting tax-deductible contributions and supported by many corporate matching programs. Tides Foundation's EIN is 51-0198509. Tides Foundation then forwards the full amount of the donations directly to Aceh Aid at IDEP

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1/21/2005 12:07:16 AM UTC

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