Corporate donations in GCentral are investments in your company's ability to:

• 1. Develop LabVIEW based,  mission critical solutions more efficiently and rapidly

  2. Choose from a larger pool of LabVIEW talent in the world

  3. Make informed decisions about the LabVIEW programmers you add to your team

1. Corporations make great effort to achieve business objectives in the shortest time possible using the most cost effective means possible. Internal code reuse libraries are often created to improve efficiency and lower cost.  Community code for a programming language, like Python via PiPy.org, extends the idea of reuse libraries from a corporation to the entire language itself. GCentral  enables anyone using LabVIEW to find and use reuse libraries. Further GCentral encourages the creation of new libraries that enhance LabVIEW programmer efficiency. 

A corporate donation to GCentral is an investment in your company's ability to develop LabVIEW based, mission critical solutions more efficiently and rapidly through reuse code provided by the LabVIEW community of developers. 

2. GCentral helps grow the pool of LabVIEW talent in the world by making LabVIEW itself more attractive to those learning new programming languages. When a potential programmer sets out to learn a new language, they typically have a task in mind. The language that enables them to accomplish that task the quickest will likely gain their trust. Languages that have robust syntax and semantics are certainly important, but equally important are languages that have a large set of code designed to accomplish tasks in the language. GCentral encourages the creation of reuse libraries designed to accomplish specific tasks. As the number of libraries grows, the capability of the language grows and so does the number of people who use it.

A corporate donation to GCentral allows your company to choose from a larger pool of talent in the world by growing the number of programmers using LabVIEW.  

3. GCentral enables LabVIEW Programmers to  contribute reuse libraries to the world, and enables the LabVIEW community to comment and rate those contributions. Over time, LabVIEW programmers build up a body of work that acts as their curriculum vitae. 

A corporate donation to GCentral allows you to make informed decisions about the LabVIEW programmers you add to your team.

NI Alliance Partners' donations in GCentral are investments in your company's ability to:

• 1. Focus on developing new intellectual property instead of reinventing the wheel (or worse yet, a flat tire!) 

  2. Make it easier to recruit new LabVIEW team members

1. As an Alliance Partner, you want to spend your time solving new problems and refining your expertise in your domain area. You don't want to spend time solving problems that have already been solved. In the past, you may have found code that you can adapt and reuse in your programs by searching the web. GCentral will reduce that search time to minutes and give you a way to assess the quality of the code before you download it. 

2.  One of the main concerns from Alliance Partners is how hard it is to recruit LabVIEW talent. GCentral will showcase the code LabVIEW programmers share with the world. You will be able to evaluate their contributions and read what other members of the community think of their work. Good quality, working code speaks more than hundreds of lines on a resume.

Individual community member donations to GCentral can be made in two ways:

• 1. Financial

  2. Participation

GCentral is seeking financial contributions at all levels to develop and maintain this resource.  But beyond financial contributions, we also need contributions to the packages that are offered.  Consider sharing code you think could be useful to others.  Consider the following benefits of contributing your code:

• 1. Demonstrating your programming skills to the world.  GCentral can be part of your online resume/CV showing your best work to community leaders looking for G programmers to hire.

  2. Learning from your peers.  No single person has all of the G knowledge.  Learning from your peers is a great way to be exposed to different ways to solve the problem. Reuse, improve, rate, and build on top of the best resources.

  3. Influencing best coding standards and practices.  Help perfect coding standards by adding your examples of what works best for you.  Help the community as a whole to grow and perfect itself.  

  4. Reducing development friction.  For every engineering problem, you should ask yourself: 

     • Has someone already solved this?  

     • Did they solve it in a way that works for what I'm doing?  

     • Would it be a better return on investment (ROI) to reuse a public resource?

     • Could I add the features I need to something existing?  

     • Or am I going to have to create my own solution?  

GCentral can help you answer these questions by making publicly shared resources easy to find.  And if you find you need to originate a new solution, GCentral gives you confidence you aren't "re-inventing the wheel" in ignorance.