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Ask HN: Best way to donate my dev skills?

19 points by vikingcaffiene ↗ HN
I have been wanting to contribute my time and skills to some charitable organizations and/or worthy causes lately. I feel like this could make a larger impact than, say, just throwing money at causes I believe in and hoping that those people do something other than give themselves a pay bump with it or some corrupt dictator buy himself a new gold helicopter.. The problem is that I have _zero_ idea where to start. For the time being I just want to dip my toe in the water so to speak to see how things go. I have a family so I only have so much extra time to give. My main areas of expertise lie in JavaScript/NodeJS but have a ton of experience in a lot of other parts of the stack and am comfortable working with languages like PHP. Are there organizations out there that are in dire need of someone with good web development skills?

16 comments

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ro-ka
I’m sure there are. Just ask around at organizations that look interesting to you.

In my city there was a ferry for NGOs some time ago so anyone could find an engagement they enjoy.

sharp11
I think this is a great thing to do. I've donated development time to a few different non-profits. The small ones, in particular, are often extremely in need of help and the benefit gained can be enormous.

The biggest thing to consider up front is -- of course -- maintenance. It's not that helpful to come in and bang out some code and then disappear. Find a topic area that you really care about, and then find one small non-profit that you think is doing great work in that area. Then, if you possibly can, build a long-term relationship with them. It doesn't have to be a big time commitment. But it probably does need to be an ongoing commitment. At least for a reasonable length of time.

chrisamccoy
We have some engineering and product need at Data4America, an educational non-profit bringing data science to politics.

Our core belief is there's too much noise in politics. The future should be visual, powered by data.

We've built a crowdsourced platform for data viz, data models, infographics, etc. Our editorial board reviews, votes, edits, and publishes.

We open source our code, the underlying data in the stories, and the 'how to'

Here are some early looks at our stories: - https://data4america.org/geography-american-jobs/ - http://lifemap.io/ben-carson/

Shoot me an email to chris@data4america.org to learn more.

Here's our team: http://data4america.org/team

azurelogic
Find out if you have a local Code For America brigade (http://www.codeforamerica.org). They're interested in building apps and tools to help communities and local governments work together.
chadkruse
HashtagCharity is a good source of dev-centric volunteer opportunities (https://hashtagcharity.org/).

If you don't mind wading through non-tech opportunities, you might get lucky at Reddit /r/nonprofitprojects (https://www.reddit.com/r/nonprofitprojects), Idealist (http://www.idealist.org), or VolunteerMatch (http://www.volunteermatch.org/).

If you want to focus on helping early stage, tech-driven nonprofits, I'd recommend searching through the portfolios of Fast Forward (a nonprofit accelerator) and the YC nonprofit program and reach out directly to any nonprofits you find interesting. Fast Forward: http://www.ffwd.org/tech-nonprofits/. YC Nonprofits: https://github.com/smartergiving/open-data/blob/master/v0/fu...

Personally though, I've found getting to know a local nonprofit can be most rewarding. In my experience, almost all nonprofits can use a soundboard for general web development...feedback on an agency's statement of work, integrating 3rd party donate buttons, assessing new CMS's, etc. If you have the time to do the work yourself, all the better.

Good luck!

vikingcaffiene
These links are great. I will go through and see if anything stands out. Thanks!
secfirstmd
Come help us out at www.secfirst.org. We are building a free mobile app to help journalists, aid workers and activists manage their digital and physical security.
rebootthesystem
I think the most valuable impact you can make is to teach something to kids. The biggest problem with kids learning technology is that you can't just drop hardware in front of them. That's my main peeve with things like from Lego Mindstroms to Raspberry Pi, the companies or organizations don't place a lot of effort into creating palatable curriculum.

Anyhow, over time, inspiring kids to learn about technology is probably the most valuable thing you can do. There are many ways to do this. I'll mention three:

    - Find your local FIRST robotics FRC team and become a mentor
         - Most teams have kids who want to do web stuff
         - http://www.firstinspires.org/

    - Offer your local school to teach the kids web-dev/programming
         - Greenfoot is a great resource for this:
              http://www.greenfoot.org/door
         - Or Scratch:
              https://scratch.mit.edu/

    - Start a meetup group for kids where you teach web dev
         - Same resources as above
         - Your local Barnes & Noble typically has a community 
           room you can use for meetups (rules apply)
mkwenhua
What city do you live in? Have you ever considered mentoring or teaching someone who really wants to start coding?

Currently there is a lot of charities and NGO's that do classes for people to get tech skills. But I personally believe if you really want to make a sure impact, find and pick one individual that you know is dedicated and willing to learn, because in my experience coding isn't something you can casually learn, it's a huge commitment and the only way to make an impact is to give someone a second chance, or allow someone to prove themselves.

That's what Mr. Miyagi did

vikingcaffiene
I live in LA.

I completely agree with your point about mentoring someone one on one and in fact have been doing that for a little over a year with someone. He just started at an entry level tech job a few months back so booyah there :-). The experience has been very rewarding (and far more challenging than I anticipated). My skills are the product of mentoring from a kind stranger (now a close friend) so I definitely intend to do more of that.

mkwenhua
That's awesome, I had a mentor that guided me when I decided I wanted a career change and I am extremely grateful for that. I actually started doing classes at a local outreach program and I was quite upset when I learned that the people in charge were more interested in superficial appearances than providing useful skills. For example they wanted me to have a class where they essentially build a website using more template and a jQuery UI library, and when I told them that the students need to begin with the basics, they disagreed since they said it would "look bad".

But anyways, I still went along with it because I am hoping someone who was like me will show up, and then I can teach them. But I feel that the actual classes they have are more like motivational feel good TED talks as opposed to being actually useful.

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hienyimba
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1 point by hienyimba 1 day ago | parent | on: Ask HN: Best way to donate my dev skills?

Wow. thank God I saw this. I am based in a developing nation (one of the biggest in the world) and just started working on a project to make govt. officials responsible to the people. For so long, corruption has been the bane of my society and i truly feel i have a chance to change my country.

Kindly contact me at hienyimba@gmail.com ... God bless you.

By the way, here is some validation - http://techmoran.com/ceo-weekends-18-year-old-nigerian-youth...

akulbe
Teach others how to program, so you can encourage others to pay it forward, as you are doing!!
hienyimba
Wow. thank God I saw this. I am based in a developing nation (one of the biggest in the world) and just started working on a project to make govt. officials responsible to the people. For so long, corruption has been the bane of my society and i truly feel i have a chance to change my country.

Kindly contact me at hienyimba@gmail.com ... God bless you.

By the way, here is some validation - http://www.biztechafrica.com/article/young-entrepreneur-sets...

http://techmoran.com/ceo-weekends-18-year-old-nigerian-youth...