Online Philanthropy: From the Clink of a Coin to the Click of a Mouse

With the assistance of undergraduates in a computer science course, a Rhode Island couple's idea for online giving is about to go live.

by Tracie Sweeney

A Rhode Island couple will realize their vision of changing people's lives - one mouse click at a time - when a new online philanthropy site created by a handful of Brown students goes live this spring.

The concept for the site, Enrichanother.com, comes from Pat Mastors, a journalist for WPRI Channel 12, and her husband, businessman Jim Mastors. Philanthropy "is something we feel very passionate about," said Pat. "Everybody has a gift, whether it is time, talent, goods, services, or money. We wanted to find a way to facilitate this sharing."

The couple envisioned a robust, one-stop Web site for charitable action, whether that be a business looking to fund a worthy community project; a nonprofit seeking a direct way to appeal for funds; coordinated crisis relief for a massive natural disaster; or a youngster wishing to donate an outgrown bike to a child in need. Taking its cues from Amazon and eBay, Enrichanother.com would be searchable in a host of ways; users could create lists of favorites and track their online giving; and donor as well as charity would receive feedback from one another. The site also would integrate information from GuideStar.org, an organization offering an online database that discloses financial, mission and administrative information about nearly one million nonprofit organizations.

What the Mastorses lacked was technical know-how. This past summer, the couple approached faculty of the University's Department of Computer Science in hopes of securing a sponsor for the public service project.

Steven Reiss, a professor of computer science, was teaching a new freshman seminar, "Building a Web Application," in the fall. Working with the Mastorses, he realized, would give the students the experience of building a commercial-scale Web application for a real-world client while learning the basics of software engineering and the technologies necessary to create sophisticated Web sites - such as HTML, Perl, PHP, and databases.

Reiss brought his class on board. What followed was a semester full of readings, lectures, discussions, and demonstrations, including a November 24 presentation to Governor Donald Carcieri and his staff. But most of all, it involved long hours writing thousands of lines of code, testing, and revising components of the project the Mastorses hoped to launch in time for the holidays.

The course "was nothing at all what I expected," said Andrew Chin, who began the class anticipating such assignments as building a Web site calculator or writing a file upload page - good exercises, but "not really practical," he said. Working for a real client "is much more fun than normal homework assignments that never get touched after you get them back."

Tatyana Dyshlova agreed. "This project really showed me the possibilities of what could be done on the Web and, more importantly, how it can be done," said Dyshlova, who had little programming experience before taking the course.

The launch date proved to be overly optimistic, but on December 9 the students presented a working version to the Mastorses, who were thrilled not only by what they saw - a complex system of integrated information presented in an easy-to-use format - but also by the dedication and talent demonstrated by Reiss and his students - Chin, Brandon Diamond, Dyshlova, Jason French, Young Kim, Daniel Kuebrich, Michael Papale, Daniel Rogers, Mark Tuttle, and Shiyin Wang, and undergraduate teaching assistant Raphael Lee.

Pat Mastors hesitates to predict how far and wide Enrichanother.com might reach, but the group has a handful of other e-philanthropy sites to use as a comparison. One - Network for Good - is considered by many to be the Internet's leading charitable resource. Since its creation in 2001 by AOL, the Time Warner Foundation, Cisco Systems, and Yahoo, Networkforgood.org has distributed more than $45 million in donations to more than 15,000 nonprofits, and matched more than 150,000 volunteers with thousands of nonprofit organizations nationwide.

Though the class itself has ended, "a significant amount of work remains to be done," said Kuebrich, who, with Chin, Dyshlova and others, intends to continue to work with the Mastorses to refine the site and develop it further. "To just leave the project now, after all this work, would be rather dissatisfying," said Chin.