Welcome to USFirstGirls.org

In less than a week, we're thrilled to report that USFirstGirls has already received $130 in donations - and thanks to our generous sponsor Technology Garden who has pledged to match the first $1,000 we raise, in effect we're already at $260. Not too shabby for five days! While we still have a long way to go before this actually covers our costs, it's great to see many independent teams working together on a single project like this.

For those that are interested in our approach, we're using WePay to accept donations for USFirstGirls.org. They've sponsored us with a fee-free account, and their new take on collecting money for groups lets donors and anyone else who is interested see exactly how money we've collected is spent.

To promote even more transparency regarding how we have spent funds, we're putting together a spreadsheet of all of our expenses. Not only will we publish this for the sake of making the information available, but we want to ensure that other teams working on USFG in future years don't have to duplicate our efforts to hunt down materials and suppliers. USFirstGirls is going to be an ongoing project that lives beyond the 2009-2010 build season, but our (Team 1073's) goal is to work with more teams as time goes on and eventually have it be a standalone project, not one that's owned by any one team.

In the interest of full disclosure, the author of this post (Eric Stern) is currently an employee of WePay. Click here to learn more about donating to USFirstGirls.