I am a geek. I’ve been told numerous times that I’m a “geek with people skills” but note that that phrase still classifies me as a geek.

I came out of the high tech industry and immensely enjoyed my time there. And one of fun things in my daily work life is working on our site with Kevin and Fred from Veatch Design.

I’m often asked how to create something like Fair Trade Sports if you aren’t a geek. The short answer is to hire Veatch Design.

But if I was not friends with Kevin and Fred already, I would have likely gone with ifPeople: the open source, Fair Trade software folks down in Atlanta.

I’m building Fair Trade Sports as an experiment, using mostly open source software. This post is a brief answer to the many questions we are getting about how we are scaling and making a positive impact with such a small team. We are leveraging what is called Web 2.0 and open source technologies by media pundits.

Reminder: keeping a small team by leveraging these new technologies is crucial for us to reach profitability faster. And since we give away all our after-tax profits, that means your dollars do direct good with at-risk children around the world.

We deliver high-quality fairly traded sports balls (soccer, futsal, volleyball, and rugby right now…with football, basketball, baseball, and softball on the way in 2007) to you using a strong combination of heavily modified open source software that includes:

• WordPress and Flickr to keep you informed and engaged via our blog and photography
• osCommerce to bring you all our Fair Trade sports gear
• Quickbooks, T-HUB, and PayPal to keep your transactions with us safe, secure, and efficient
• iOperate to enable our fulfillment warehouse to bring you the best service and prices

Feedback on our site (and our company) is always welcome. We’d love to hear from you on what you like, what you find annoying, and what you’d like to see more of from our team.