Dave Thomas writes that, so far, attendees of RailsConf 2007 have donated about $33,000 to selected charities. It’s my understanding that there were about 1600 attendees, so that averages out to over $20 per person (again, so far).

My mind immediately went back to a story I recently heard about the A-Day football game at the University of Alabama back in April. That day, fundraisers at Bryant-Denny Stadium were accepting donations to be used towards relief for victims of the tornado that struck Enterprise, Alabama on March 1. If you’ve forgotten the story, this was the F-4 tornado that (among other things) destroyed Enterprise High School, killing eight high school students when part of the school collapsed on them.

The University of Alabama experienced record attendance at this year’s A-Day game. With more than 92,000 fans in attendance, “fire marshals had to turn fans away because Bryant-Denny stadium was full.” Despite these overwhelming numbers, fundraisers collected a little less than $40,000 that day. Assuming that the numbers are even approximately close, that averages to less than fifty cents donated per person in attendance.

The point of all this isn’t to bash Alabama fans — not that that’s not a worthy pursuit in and of itself. It’s a little bit of an apples and oranges comparison to begin with, considering that at least some of the RailsConf donations came from companies and not individuals, and that a lot of the Alabama fans had no doubt made donations through their churches or other organizations.

The point is that this has the promise of becoming a great side benefit of Ruby and Rails conferences to come. Competitive geeks that we are, each new group of conference attendees will try to break the record for donations. I don’t attend a lot of technical conferences, so maybe this is something that is more common than I realize. Regardless, it’s another great reason to be a part of this community.