Ask HN: Best way to “donate” dev hours to charity?
Hey,
I work at a service oriented dev company and from time to time we have some bench time to utilize. I'd like to keep people engaged on projects and ideally exposed them to best practices as much as possible.
What's the best way to find places to "donate" our time to certain charities or non-profit organizations?
Right now people are going out to our most used third party open source software repos and actively contributing there, but I'd like to do more of a full on apps.
Thanks
78 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 161 ms ] threadConsidering teaching instead.
Check out Big Brothers Big Sisters mentorship program, I think your contribution there could be more impactful.
It just isn't worth the overhead of dealing with people who believe they are doing a favor when those people are not committed.
If you want to use slack time to help charities, rent a van and drive the team down to the soup kitchen. Standing behind the counter in a hair net will build more character than being DRY.
Good luck.
I know that's not exactly the question, but adding that donating labor is also enjoyable to many workers. In my case the best was at the SF-Marin food bank, and Feed My Starving Children was fun too. Even picking up trash around a neighborhood with a work center was okay, nice to get outside.
I'm currently really struggling in life (barely eat once a day at the moment) but I'm really passionate about Linux & free software. So, a free laptop could really help me get local jobs (e.g. sysadmin or web developer for SMEs), put food on the table, & pay rent! Thank you!
Basically, the best way to do charity is to first accumulate a lot of wealth. Only then will you be able to move the important pointers. Obviously controversial, but still refreshing to see a different take.
The question is, is it likely, or even possible, to be motivated to make lots and lots of money, and then have that process of earning lots and lots of money not affect you? Is everyone who chases a seven-figure-income destined to eventually become an asshole?
See Wikipedia and associated links: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carlos_Slim#Reactions
I contribute to https://karrot.world/ sometimes.
Also found this interesting https://hospitalrun.io/
see --> https://www.hotosm.org/partners/volunteer-engagement
"VIRTUAL AND REMOTE VOLUNTEERING OPPORTUNITIES We can support you to quickly engage large groups of employees to help map places vulnerable to natural disasters or experiencing poverty
For the past ten years, the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (HOT) has been the global leader in community mapping, supporting humanitarian responses to nearly 100 disasters and crises. During this time we have refined virtual and remote volunteering methologies to make it easier for organizations to engage employees through digital mapping and drive social impact. As many organizations shift to remote work, we are more than ready to help you stay close to the issues that are most important for your Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) goals.
Join the Missing Maps project to improve your employee engagment and Corporate Social Responsibility programs!
What? Digital volunteering to map vulnerable unmapped places: your global workforce can quickly get started, working together on the same activity! HOT can support you with mapping training webinars across all timezones."
or just OpenStreetMap - write to https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/dev
I do a lot of work with an animal shelter, and I remember 10-ish years ago some fancy agency came in and donated a new website... only, it took staff time to help gather requirements, and test, and we all had to go through training... and it came with some license fees, and we then had to hire more devs to work on the code since it wasn't something anyone in-house knew. (The agency offered a "discounted" maintenance rate that was still like way outside of our budget.)
Long story short, we had to throw out the nice new website after about a year, and have our in-house guys re-build a junky one that they could could support and manage. Then go through training again... and in the end, the "donation" cost us a ton of time and effort that could have been put into making the old site a little better. And... it was painful, right? Like it took another year to get things sort of where we started.
It's hard to give tech away, right? Like you have to have the supporting staff, infrastructure, knowledge... I think you'd be better off just making some money, by taking side projects, and donating the money to the charity of your choice.
Unless you're going to be a long-term volunteer, and commit to supporting and maintaining everything you build, it's generally not worth it for the org to use stuff that is beyond what the current staff can repair / re-build.
Non-profits are pretty bad at documenting requirements, or having any sort of automated testing, so you go in and upgrade some things, or patch some things, and they're still going to need training... and they're still going to need an organization-wide test to make sure everyone can still get what they need out of the tech. Inevitably someone will have some plugin that isn't compatible with the upgraded version, or someone will have some service that needs to get re-built to fire reports nobody knows about until they don't show up in the right inboxes.
Money the org can use to hire a staff member who will be a "permanent" fixture is always going to be better for them than someone coming in and doing work and not sticking around to support it.
However, there is a case for volunteering directly for cause one is passionate about — you feel more fulfilled, it is enriching, you get to know people who care about the same things you do, you have a chance to be involved in making decisions and so on.
A friend (software engineer) recently spent some time helping some organization to plant trees. Some other friends (also engineers) make lighthearted fun of him, saying that his time would be much better spent making money and then donating it to someone else to plant the trees. But I don't think he made the wrong decision.
So here's what I'd do if you know of a charity that your team cares about, ask them what tools they use, what challenges they have with those tools, are there any features they wish existed. If multiple orgs have these similar issues, then work on some open source solution or cheap solution + really good documentation for it, and offer that up.
My organization is itself a 501c3, and our charitable mission is to provide developers with opportunities to learn and network. We do this by organizing monthly technical meetings, networking events, career panels, and hackathons. All at no cost to our members (no fees, tickets, or dues).
We also provide support to a larger network of meetup groups in the Tampa Bay area [2]. These groups are more specialized into specific disciplines/areas of interest. Many of these died out during the pandemic so rehabilitating that scene is an important mission for us as well.
[1] https://www.tampadevs.com/ [2] https://tampa.dev/
0: https://generativereview.substack.com/p/tasks-open-source-em...
Volunteer contributors can search these bugs by programming language or product area on https://codetribute.mozilla.org
Some volunteer contributors have become Mozilla employees (myself included :)
I'm currently really struggling in life (I barely eat once a day at the moment) but I'm really passionate about Linux/free software. So, a free laptop could really help me get local jobs (sysadmin or web developer for SMEs), put food on the table, & pay rent! Thanks!
You would be helping out teams of high school students build and program their robots for competitions. This generally happens around January-April but most teams also work on their skills in the off-season.
I do this in an in-person capacity but virtual mentorship opportunities are available as well. Topics that are helpful for the team to learn in the coding space would be Java and code management best practices (mostly Git). If you have a bit of mechanical knowledge that can help as well.
I just came back from a competition happening on the weekend and it's a very rewarding experience.
Note that you'd need a Youth Protection screening (in Canada it's basically a Vulnerable Sector Screening with the police) because you'd be working with kids.
Unless you can commit for a longer term, it probably may not be worth their while.
As it turned out, what I helped them with wasn't code, but a bit of configuration and tuning, but they said it honestly created about a hour of time back per day for most of the workers. There was part of a flow that would often grind a long time and/or error out. Making that fast and reliable was the best low-effort thing I could deliver.
Then a tally at the end to see what was practical to fix, commonly disliked experiences across users, etc.
The one thing I'd do different is ask for maybe 2 rounds of interviews, or longer interviews with 2-3 people to start with. The later interviews I did better, since I understood base concepts better. So I probably missed good info from the people I talked to earliest.
If true, this has so much potential for fraud and abuse that I doubt this is allowed.
Imagine a motivational speaker billing businesses for one week and "donating" time for another week to charities effectively nullifying their income.
I think write-offs are generally on cash basis and on expenses incurred.
My experience offering help to big organizations can't be worse. First was a long time ago, I was unemployed and pennyless. Some NGO appeared on tv asking for volunteers to go to Africa for some humanitarian project. I called. "Sorry, we need no more people (after an hour on air saying they desperately needed many), can you instead donate some money?"
Second time, I offered free consulting after a similar request. They rebounded me between some employees, then silence.
It also might be worth developing a program yourself if you're passionate enough about it. There are a few dev shops in my city that run their own charity projects every year where they invite nonprofits to submit proposals for the work they need done, and then the shop picks a few projects to work on for free. Those seem to be super popular as well.
[1] https://codeforgoodwm.org
You can sign up for a one hour call with a charity which has a problem/needs advice. There's no committment after that but you can get more involved with that charity if you like/it's appropriate
I've volunteered with it a few times, all felt productive/ hopefully helpful to the charities involved
https://codefordc.org/
Email is nick@neonlaw.org - we work worldwide from US to Africa to Europe and would love to have you!
I think the only time it doesn't feel too galling is when you really believe in the charity and what they do but I would always be careful to set expectations and set a time and duration limit initially so you can get out if it is really not worthwhile and you don't want to seem like a jerk.
Truth is that lots of people don't know how difficult technical things can be so they ask you to build a website or "just change this" because they think websites are like Word documents.
You might get more engaged employees if instead of donating dev time, you save it up and once a month you spend a few hours together sorting out a park or cleaning rubbish somewhere etc. :-)