The first group of iVolunteer (now SnapImpact) volunteers. Photo by Andrew Hyde

Community collaboration is the new black.  People everywhere are looking at more ways to serve their communities and help each other out.  Though it’s a tired phrase, we really do get more by giving.

My current volunteer projects are helping the Wild Animal Sanctuary with social media marketing and helping SnapImpact with marketing and connecting the volunteers to other resources.  SnapImpact has a great story showing how people are coming together to help others by volunteering their talents.

Snap Impact, a way to help make doing good easy, was born from an idea that Richard Grote and Dave Angulo had while attending a Startup Weekend conference where entrepreneurs meet to form teams, companies and projects. As they discussed how much they enjoyed past volunteer projects they searched their iPhones for an app to find local volunteer opportunities and realized that the app didn’t exist.

Startup Weekend where SnapImpact was born. Photo by Andrew Hyde.

Rich and Dave were in a great position to create the non-profit SnapImpact iPhone app because they saw the need for it and also knew that the Boulder community is full of talented developers and creative professionals that would enjoy helping to build it.

After a couple of months of meeting each morning for a few hours at local coffee shops to get the project off the ground, they shared what they were doing with the Boulder tech community, tweeted about it on Twitter and had 50 volunteers show up for the first meeting. Future presentations at the monthly Boulder Denver New Tech Meetups have also attracted more help with some of the attendees still continuing to spread the word to help out.

While the team was building the app, All For Good and the Hands On Network had agreed to share their data on nationwide volunteer opportunities. This was a crucial element to creating an iPhone app that can instantly share new local volunteer opportunities with the user based on their phone’s GPS location.

You can see the WordPress PlugIn version of the SnapImpact app at the bottom right corner of this blog.

Throughout the 10 months that have passed since the project originated many volunteers have come and gone and others have stayed. All of them have given some time, knowledge and work which has helped to build a volunteer based product that will be useful for people across the country.

So, what are your passions, talents and skills and what organizations could use what you have to offer?  Volunteer them, provide some positive influence and you’ll have a brighter today while building a better tomorrow for us all.

Startup Weekend is a conference bringing together developers, business managers, startup enthusiasts, marketing gurus, graphic artists and more to a 54 hour event that builds communities, companies and projects.  Sounds cool, right?  It is.

The concept grew from an idea by  Andrew Hyde in 2007 and now there have been over 49 Startup Weekends with 65 cities and 11 countries signed on to host more.

Rather than your typical conference of watching speakers and panels, these conferences are designed to facilitate learning through organically forming teams and getting into immediate action.  It’s a conference with some unconference elements that facilitate cumulative collaboration creating community and companies.

It kicks off with all the participants sharing their backgrounds and answering the question, “What’s your problem?”  Over the years I’ve discovered what a crucial question this is to ask for any business or proposed project, product or service.

A classic mistake most entrepreneurs and companies make is that they get excited about an idea and invest valuable time and money into creating a product or service they think is great.  Then they take it to market and try to convince the public to be interested in it.  This is why so many of them fail.  If people aren’t interested in what you’re offering then you don’t have a business.

It’s much more effective to ask people what they want and provide that.  Or even better, ask them what problems they currently have and provide simple and powerful solutions to those problems.  That’s where the sweet spot of helping people and making a profit lie.

Jason Janelle, Tom Markiewicz & Harry Love build an internal media sharing solution; Ron Bronson makes a Twitter-based baseball application; Neil Simon creates WordPress Plugins

In the case of this Startup Weekend, after identifying problems we all broke into teams to immediately start building the solutions.  Through conversations covering design, development and marketing things moved very quickly.

Within the first 3 hours of meeting this morning one product was a ‘fast fail’ (Rosetta Stone already has a similar version of how to connect people who want to practice their second languages with people of equal levels of skill), and a name and WordPress Plugin were created for SpotGrab – a product to connect renters with available apartments.  And that’s just what happened for two of the projects.

Though products, projects and companies are birthed at Startup Weekends, the first focus is on community.  Regardless of any outcome, the conference provides an environment for internet creatives to meet and share their skills with one another.

About a month ago I volunteered to help with business development, marketing and PR for iVolunteer which is a product born from the last Boulder Startup Weekend.

We’re developing a website, iPhone app and WordPress plugin that enables you to find local volunteer opportunities aligned with your interests easily anywhere.  There are over 30 volunteers working on this.  Most of us found out about it after two guys met at the last Boulder Startup Weekend and saw an unfulfilled need.

I’m wondering how similar conferences can be created outside of the tech world to generate collaboration and community.  The registration fee goes entirely to the food budget and the space rental (unless it’s donated like it was this weekend.)  Aside from this, participants are welcome to drop in and out as their schedules demand.  This makes it easy for people to contribute in whatever ways work for them.

How could you create an event like this in your community based around your interests to share your influence and bring people together in fun and productive ways?  Or an easier way to look at it is, ‘What’s your problem?’  Just asking.