After months of planning, and a grueling week of 12-16 hour days, this year’s DEFCON experience is over. Last year at DEFCON, I announced the idea of Hackers for Charity before my talk to a good round of applause. This year, the community continued in their support and pitched in nearly $5,000 dollars ($150 of which from the crew of Guitar Hero and several hundred dollars from various individual donors) for our cause. This might not seem like a lot of money, but this total represents 40% of HFC’s total income, including the funds raised since the beginning of the johnny.ihackstuff.com Charity Fund back in January, 2005. This is a Big Deal™ to us.

160 people also signed our book, offering to join our volunteer pool, which now sits at over 500 volunteers. This is a Really Big Deal™ to us because our volunteers really form the backbone of our organization. Volunteers like Paul, Rob, Jason, AJ, Kyle, Josh + Janice and Kathleen gave of their time during the conference to man the booth, field questions and promote our cause. Lots of other folks pitched in as well. Julie pitched in the artwork for the shirts and the eight-foot banner, Tanya and Jeff submitted the designs for the three-foot banners, Jesse Krembs donated our three-foot banners, Roger over at Lone Pine Ridge donated the cool tablecloth, nuBridges donated the coasters which we re-tooled and sold as fundraisers, and Syngress and Ryan donated the signed Stealing the Identity books we sold.

This was a great conference, and we signed up lots of volunteers and made some money. But more importantly, I was pleasantly surprised to see Hackers For Charity begin to take massive strides on it’s own, without me pushing it along. DEFCON was another milestone for HFC and it served as a great reminder that we’ve really tapped into something that’s been lying dormant in the hacker community for far too long: the original pioneering spirit of the hacker that can overcome seemingly insurmountable odds to make a real difference in this world. Thanks, everyone for another great year at DEFCON!