In 2009, Stack Overflow LLC had three employees, and three primary sites -- Stack Overflow, Server Fault, and Super User. Plus our careers site at careers.stackoverflow.com
In 2010, we incorporated as Stack Overflow Internet Services with venture capital funding. We also grew to twenty-four employees, and 38 primary sites (of which, to be fair, 19 are currently beta). We also created our fantastic network hub at stackexchange.com and the democratic, community driven site creation process at Area 51.
My, how time flies when you're having fun!
But the community is far bigger than us. Our fellow community moderators generously contribute their time, passion, and leadership to make their sites worth visiting and participating in. We now have over a hundred and thirty community moderators across 38 sites. Can you believe it?
As a small gesture of thanks, we offered to make a $100 donation to charity on behalf of each community moderator. I'm happy to report that through the generosity of our community moderators, the following donations were made this holiday season:
- Unicef -- $3,200
- Doctors Without Borders -- $4,400
- Wikimedia Foundation -- $2,600
- Amnesty International -- $2,800
Our community moderators give their own time to cultivate sharing knowledge within their expert communities -- they make it possible for everyone to learn together. A worthy cause, and this $13,000 donation is provided in that very same spirit.
I also wanted to give back to the tools, people, and projects that inspired us and helped us build our own network of websites. To that end, the following donations were made:
- W3C Consortium -- $1,000
- WordPress Foundation -- $1,000
- WikiMedia Foundation -- $1,000
- Canonical -- $1,000
- Linux Foundation -- $1,000
- Internet Archive -- $1,000
- Creative Commons -- $1,000
- DotNetOpenAuth -- $500
- OpenID Foundation -- $1,000
- OpenSTV -- $1,000
- Nagios -- $1,000
- Electronic Frontier Foundation -- $1,000
We believe our mission as a company is to make the internet better, and we're proud to support our fellow internet citizens who walk alongside us toward this goal.
Of course, none of our sites could exist without you -- the people who contributed to any Stack Exchange network site in the spirit of peers helping each other. We hope you learned something while you were there, or even better, taught us something we didn't yet know.
I have no idea what's going to happen in 2011, but I look forward to the journey with all of you.