I am not sure if you have been following along with the progress meter that appears on the SDN and BPX home page for the Points for U.N. World Food Programme.
I have and when it first came out I thought, "Great I could write a little scraper to grab the number every day and track the progress". Initially the meter was an image so that wasnt possible. Now the points is in the code of the html so it is possible to scrape the current total out.
I went for a low tech solution. Yesterday I wrote (with a pen a pager) at the top of the my todo list the current total. It was 1,761,894. Today I repeated the process (it's a simple algorithm I know) Just a few short moments ago it was at 1,772,288.
So with a little maths (yes it is spelled with an S by most of the world) we have:
1772288 / 199 average of 8906 point a day so far this year.
1772288 - 1761894 = 10394 point in the last 24 hours.
If we continue at that rate for the rest of the year (166 days) we have 1725404 points which when added to the total to day is 3,497,692 a mere 2308 point shy of out goal of 3,500,000 so we as a community make a contribution of €200,000 to the worlds hungry.
I am excited about that because:
- We are very close to our goal
- My maths have not taken a very big sample so there is bound to be inaccuracies.
- TechEd is going to give us a big bump with everyone submitting sessions, being involved in community day or SDN day or BPX day and writing blog posts promoting those sessions, creating new and exciting projects for DemoJam etc etc
You might not even think about this part of what we are dong very much but I am encouraging you to think about it from time to time. Think about how being involved in a such a great community such as the SAP Community Network is not just a technical or business community but it is a human community and a community that cares.
Here's to 3,500,000.
