Be a Better For-Good Worker!

Scrumming for a Good Cause

Instituted in January 2005 by cofounder David Filo, the Yahoo! for Good Scrum is an opportunity for employees to take up to three months off of their day jobs and apply their skills to projects that have a positive impact on the world. The scrum is a highly collaborative, self-organized team that usually requires 6-8 employees, and delivers defined results.

Following are some recent Yahoo! for Good Scrums:

• Yahoo! Green site: A team of highly-talented designers and engineers created an entire site to help our audience battle climate change in small, but powerfully effective ways.
• Disaster Preparedness Site: We’re not waiting for the next disaster to strike. We’re building a site that helps connect family and friends and provides valuable resources now.
• ONE: A cross-functional team of engineers and designers came together to help rebuild the ONE.org site—and build the world’s biggest virtual community to help fight poverty. The Yahoos built a platform using Yahoo! Groups, Yahoo! Answers, Flickr, and Yahoo! Avatars. Since its launch, traffic to the ONE.org site has more than doubled. The site has been heralded as the best example to date of a non-profit organization embracing Web 2.0 tools.
• DonorsChoose: For our pilot Yahoo! for Good Scrum, five Yahoo! engineers worked with DonorsChoose to help rebuild their site. The Yahoos worked side by side with the organization’s team to improve the software design and robustness, making it more flexible for future product upgrades. It’s a great example of leveraging our technical resources to help our partners reach their goals.