Why is it that Crisis Camps seem to smack of pretentiousness? "Look at me, I care about people because I used my Mac to build a python shim to a JSON API."

-These people don't have food or water.
-They make in a year what you spend on soy lattes a week.
-Python is something that eats their children

Stop thinking you know what these NGOs need (Surprise! It's not a technical solution!) Instead give them money so they can get what they know they need.

The pretentiousness comes in with the blatant "look at me doing this thing." Liveblogging and photos and the what not. If you spent 1/2 the time doing something meaningful that you spend documenting that you are doing something silly we would be in a much better place. I completely agree with Paul Carr's "Look at me looking at this" criticism.

I have a friend from college named Oscar. Oscar has, for the last 5 years, (possibly more) spent Thanksgiving and Christmas day working in homeless shelters. I have known Oscar for 10 years and he has never even alluded to this charity work. The only way I know about it is that his mom slipped up once in front of me and said something about if he'd be able to leave the shelter in time to meet up with us all for a movie.

Oscar is helping people and tells no one about it. Crisis Campers are all collectively masturbating Web 2.0 nonsense to feel good about themselves and then posting, Digg-ing, tweeting their geek pornography for all the world to see.

Distasteful.