As anyone who follows me on Twitter knows, last week I participated in the MBTweetRace as a member of #MBTeamS. (If you are not familiar with the MBTweetRace, read this post from Andrew Careaga.)

With Todd Sanders (@tsand) and John Pederson (@ijohnpederson) at the wheel, the higher ed web community stepped up big time.  The level of involvement and enthusiam was truly amazing. By Friday night, I was hunkered down in my command center tweeting so fast that my hands actually started to hurt.

I’m happy to report that #MBTeamS won the race going away and in the process raised over $50,000 for St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital. Kids and cancer should never be used in the same sentence and I’m proud we made a small step towards reaching that that goal.

I am still processing my thoughts on the larger lessons learned about social media and will share these thoughts at a later date.  My guess is that even Mercedes Benz learned a thing or two about social media.  In the meantime, check out these post-race thoughts from Michael Stoner, Karine Joly, Patrick Powers, Lori Packer and Robin Smail.

I think the best way to capture the spirit of #MBTeamS is to create a photo mosaic poster made up of the Twitter avatars of the team members to give to St. Jude.  I have been very involved with the Ride For Roswell, the major fundraising event for the Roswell Park Cancer Institute in Buffalo, NY. Last year was the 15th anniversary of the Ride and to commemorate the occasion this photo mosaic poster of the hospital was created.  I’d like to do the same for #MBTeamS and St. Jude.  Depending on the interest level, we might even be able to sell the poster as a way to raise more money for this great cause.

To make this happen, the first step is to collect the Twitter avatars of all the #MBTeamS members.  Chas Grundy has stepped up and created a spreadsheet of the 1,638 people who tweeted with the #MBTeamS hashtag going back to January 31st.  This list will need some minor editing.  There were a few people spamming the hashtag and I definitely want them eliminated.  One big question is a legal one – do we need to obtain permission from everyone who’s avatar we want to use?  I am not a lawyer and don’t deal with this issue very often,  so I would definitely like some advise and guidance.

Once we have collected the avatars, we will need to design the poster, again paying attention to any legal issues around the images that we use.  We’ll need a graphic designer to create the poster and someone with experience with photo mosaics.  There are a variety of software packages to create photo mosaics. I do not have experience with any of them and my Photoshop skills have diminished over the years, so let me know if you have any recommendations.  I have a meeting tomorrow with the Ride For Roswell and will check with then on how they created their poster as well.

So who’s in? I’ve had dozens of people on Twitter volunteer to help and encourage you to do so as well. Let’s make this happen.