Ask HN: What kind of jobs exist for Computer Scientists in social justice?

You're wonderfully fortunate in that you have a skillset which scales to infinity and beyond. Many of the people who are doing things you think are important are working in the virtual stone-age. You can alleviate that, and give them force-multipliers which will let them spend more of their sharply limited time/effort/money on stuff that matters and less of their time/effort/money on doing largely worthless things in inefficient ways.

Feeding the poor: worthwhile! Inventory management which relies on having a woman with a graduate degree count cans and tally them on paper: waste! Human factors which make eliminating her 'job' sound like you are attacking 'the cause': substantial!

Get an awesome job to get rich then use your money for whatever causes you deem are important.

Your cause maybe the most important thing in your life but that doesn't mean you can't also enjoy a challenging job.

I'm not sure what you mean by "social justice." If you mean it in the sense of ensuring equality of outcome, that's a path shown to make things worse for individuals and the societies in which they live.

If you're using the term to mean social-welfare, then join the Peace Corps, go to africa. Use your education and skills to make the distribution of resources and aid more efficient. Or start a company that links resources, aid, capital to those who can make use of them. Or take the best paying job you can find and send the disposable part to those in need. Don't avoid getting rich, it's the best welfare program we've got.

Health: Tools, apps, and services that make providing healthcare cheaper and effective throughout the world.

Energy and Environment: Tech, tools, apps, services that help increase access to reliable electricity and/or help save the planet

Food: Take your pick from growing, distributing, health, or environmental impact. Scalable solutions that provide healthy food, at low cost, to everyone, while reducing the food industries environmental impact are desperately needed.

And more...

The problems are complicated and global, and they require creative and elegant solutions that scale. Help solve these problems and you can help make the world a better place and get rich in the process.

http://www.palantirtech.com/government

You say you hate math, so they may not be right up your alley, but worth a shot.

One thing you might consider is applying for Peace Corps (or some other volunteer development agency). What you end up doing may or may not be directly connected to CS, but it will put you into an environment where you're dealing with application of specific knowledge to practical situations. Think of it as a social justice internship. You get good professional networking out of it too.

If you want to work on the US west-coast I'd recommend biotech and cleantech, also have a look at places like Google.org.

If you'd be willing to work in a developing country then there's lots of things you could work on. Corruption in particular is something that's often being tackled by computerization (by taking humans out of the loop, or by automating checks on them), for example the computerization of land records is taking place in quite a few countries. Don't underestimate the impact something like that can have, read Hernando de Soto's The Mystery of Capital if you want to understand why.

Mobile development is something that's having a major impact in developing countries at the moment, things like mobile banking are huge in Africa because they allow people who would never previously had access to bank accounts to gain access. Information systems are also transforming economies, the fact that a fisherman can now know what the market prices are in the major city (often several days walk away) means that not only can he tailor what he fishes to maximize profit but it also means that the dealer (who buys fish from him and sells it in the major city) can't rip him off by lying about market prices. The Economist had a special section on this topic a few months ago which is worth reading if you find this interesting.

Also have a look at the Grameen family of organizations, they've come up with a lot of innovative businesses and non-profits in developing countries.

If you're want to be more entrepreneurial there's pretty much opportunities in any area you can think of. So I'd recommend just reading around various problems and find something that strikes a chord with you.

One of my interests is social mobility, and from my research I found a major factors that prevents social mobility is that children from less priviledged backgrounds often get little or poor careers advice, so as one of my side projects I'm developing a website which tries to tackle that problem.

If you want to help people and make money at the same time I'd recommend having a look at self-help web/mobile applications, as there's a lot of potential in that area.

On a more general level you could consider the problems charities, ngos, etc have and how you could tackle them. In some cases the answer could be something as simple as taking standard enterprise software (CRM, ERP, task tracking, etc) and making versions designed for non-profits.

Think about the more general problems non-profits have as well (try volunteering for a few or talking to some volunteers to get ideas). From my experience non-profits often suffer from poor organization and management, how could this be tackled ?

Handling volunteers is also a major issue, if volunteering has a high barrier it puts people off from volunteering. Think about ways of reducing this (perhaps an open source approach where people can "check-out" small projects, distributed call centres that let people volunteer on an ad-hoc basis, a mechanical turk for volunteer work, etc).

As you might be able to guess I've spent a fair amount of time thinking about this sort of stuff, so feel free to email/msn me if you want to talk about it !