Best way to “donate” dev hours to charity?

It's been a while, but the most rewarding experience I had in this space was engaging directly with a small local charity. I just pitched them the idea of me getting 10 minutes with every worker that had to use a PC as part of what the charity did. I used the time to interview them, and try to identify something that affected the largest swath of workers.

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.

As board member of various non-profits here's my advice on this: Contribute to a few OSS projects. Don't donate 5 hours to humane society of brooklyn or wherever you are based. That won't move the needle much for humane society, might even cause larger tech debt problems, and who knows what else. Well run charities pay for ongoing professional services.

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.

It's hard... because you want to give your time to non-profits, but inevitably they won't be able to support or enhance what you do once you leave. Then that leaves them in a worse spot.

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.

When it comes to critical work, well run charities and non-profits typically pay for professional services.

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.

If you're in the US or Canada check out FIRST Robotics Mentor Network: https://info.firstinspires.org/mentor-network

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.

Be the most expensive consultant for traditional for-profits that you can with your spare time, and donate that money directly to the causes of your choice.

Digital Candle is a great service for providing free tech advice to charities: https://www.digitalcandle.org.uk/

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

Personally, I use my spare time towards organizing a group that supports and nurtures developer communities in my area [1].

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/

I like this take from Carlos Slim on charity: https://www.wsj.com/articles/BL-WHB-3852

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.

https://www.hotosm.org/ "HOT is an international team dedicated to humanitarian action and community development through open mapping."

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

If anyone likes classical music, I run a site that 20,000 people per month use to find baroque music to perform, and we’d be happy to have help. Elasticsearch, Rails, Postgres, K8s. Interesting problems as we move from Google Sheets to proper SQL persistence, while still maintaining good search latency. https://www.vmii.org

I'm sure there's some exceptions, but by and large you just can't. There are few if any non-profits that have a queue of coding tasks sitting around for someone to float in and out of. I say this as someone who runs a tech team for a non-profit with most of our code open on github for PRs. I don't have the wherewithal to curate a list of issues and if I did I couldn't sit around waiting for someone to just do them whenever they find it in their heart. And then just accept it without QA or product review or all the sort of standard lifecycle stuff. I've actually gotten a handful of PRs or even whole repos of code of people saying "hey, this thing will be useful for you" and it almost never really is.

Any and all tech services get contracted out with SOWs/MSAs and all the normal stuff. There are a fair number of large services and SaaS companies that cater to nonprofits or have non-profit programs. If it's not a formal offering, then we'd be taking on a huge risk by asking for work we have no guarantee on delivery or quality. Without naming names, one very large and recognizable SaaS software company that we pay money to offered us free consulting hours as part of a formal program whereby their employees can volunteer to spend a few hours per year doing consulting for non-profits. We thought it was manna from heaven, but the reality is we got about 25 hours of their time which was barely enough to educate them on our (very rudimentary) setup and get a few pointers and some non-working code. Was barely worth the time spent on Zoom.

As an even more trite example, my kid's school PTA wanted help with email templates and when I volunteered they still couldn't find the time to even onboard me to the email system to look at anything.

Sorry for the cynical rant, but I mean think about how hard software development is. You could strike gold and discover an underserved niche and build a complete service to fill it, but that's rare. There's really no substitute for just sending money.

There's civic coding groups like Code for DC. A good number of the projects are regional but there are some federal projects too. Maybe there are some civic good projects that float your boat here.

https://codefordc.org/

My city has a nonprofit called Code for Good [1] that is specifically focused on getting the tech & design community together to help other local nonprofits. I've volunteered with them countless times and the events are always super impactful. Maybe you've got something similar locally?

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

I'd say doing some sort of training might be the most beneficial thing you can bring to the NGOs. There are also organizations such as Omdena (https://omdena.com/). They solve different challenges and would probably appreciate some support, even some sort of mentorship. We supported them that way at Qdrant, and organized a semantic search workshop, while one of their local chapters was implementing a chatbot.

I emailed a non-profit and offered to help with their website.

What I've found is that our skills actually don't do much to improve the world. We're well-suited for generating economic productivity, but coding has marginal impacts on organizations whose goal is to actually help people directly in some way.

I work with them as a volunteer now, but most of what I do is help their designer debug CSS when she adds new things to the site. I did write a Salesforce integration so that a number on their site is automatically updated when people submit their contact info in a form.

But on average, I do maybe 15mins of work for them a month.

There's a few organizations which use technology directly to help people (Ashton Kutcher is involved with an organization called Thorn that uses image recognition to track down the background locations from child sexual abuse material so they can arrest the perpetrators), but most likely the best way you can help an organization is to simply do your regular "not-helping-the-world-in-any-real-way" job and donate a % of your income to people who do

There are many projects on GitHub which have been abandoned or archived, current developer does not have time to maintain it. you can find projects which interests you and work on it.

I have a concept called Fosstercare, where I planned to support Free and OSS software which people are using to be supported. but I could not pursue then, but with the advent of GPT4 and AutoGPT it makes sense to revive the idea again.

You can just donate labor to something you like or believe in. A friend of mine has done free sysadminning for a small summer camp for like 20 years. Just runs the website, does some light account management, and makes sure all of their software stays up-to-date. This kinda thing is more approachable if you know a friend of a friend who needs help, rather than trying to cold email people.

There are many good ways. Best way is very subjective.

Let me suggest what I did. Our company partnered with a local chapter of Habitat for Humanity and we (my colleagues and I) volunteered to help our local community housing projects with cleanup (yard and street cleanup, powerwashing sidings etc.,).

This happened on our own time. If you and your company are willing to utilize bench time, that is great.

When my son turned 16 (his birthday falls in November), we decided to go to the soup kitchen downtown and spend time helping out during the Thanksgiving holiday.

There was this time when we were raising funds for a cancer foundation. I announced I would shave my head if we crossed a certain target. It was nice to see every one of my DRs rallying the troops and campaigning to attain the target. I kept my promise when we reached the goal.

Personally, for me, putting in the hours directly in the communities was fulfilling; more so than contributing cash donations (which I have done), although the cash might have been even more impactful upon rational analysis.

I think some of the others have alluded to the potential to suck your time and goodwill dry for not necessarily a lot of gain. If people don't have to pay, they could easily expect you to build junk or invest time in something that is never used - same for stakeholders in normal companies right?

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. :-)

Have you heard of Home Assistant? https://www.home-assistant.io/

The community would love some passionate developers to create or update new integrations (connections to other services) and features (stuff built directly into Home Assistant)

One tip when donating professional services is to provide an invoice for the work done with the balance indicated as comped. This is essential in making sure that the recipients understand the value of what they’re getting (so on your invoice you would bill your regular rate—if you don’t do hourly billing for work, a good rule of thumb is to take your annual income and drop off the last three zeros to get an hourly rate).

That said, as many people have indicated, working directly with non-profits on a volunteer basis for professional work rarely works out. Your bench time is probably best directed towards OSS projects.

Have you looked into GiveCamp (https://givecamp.org/)? It's essentially a hackathon where you build a website for a nonprofit.

This might not be the answer you're looking for, but I've frequently heard that charities are in dire need of people willing to do hands-on work instead of the "comfy" administrative stuff. Someone who is willing to guard the entrance to a DV shelter, for example, or someone to come in and do a few loads of laundry. I know we want to help with the skills we have, but it seems charities already have enough supply of people wanting to do some low-key work. Meanwhile the real problems go unsolved.

I am looking for people to help me with my research project. Technically, it is not a charity or an NGO, but it is undoubtedly a negative profit endeavor. If you are an experienced/senior Python or a Kotlin/Android dev who wants to help improve how cognitive impairments are monitored and diagnosed, please reach out to me (email in my profile). You can contribute by writing code, reviewing code, or mentoring/consulting in your area of expertise.

I wonder if you have any spare/used/old ThinkPad/laptop that you can give to me for free? It will be life changing!

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! Thank you!

In Canada and many other countries the work you do "for free" can actually be looked at as a donation to a charity and reduce your income tax burden.

Something like that? https://github.com/protontypes/open-sustainable-technology

I contribute to https://karrot.world/ sometimes.

Also found this interesting https://hospitalrun.io/

Please send us an email? I volunteer for the Neon Law Foundation, a privacy non-profit dedicated to providing education to undergrads and law students. We believe that privacy is a fundamental human right and teach students open-source-based software and law to help protect that right.

Email is nick@neonlaw.org - we work worldwide from US to Africa to Europe and would love to have you!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Si0is6GkB64

I'd be curious if there are any strong programs where devs can provide mentorship to students interested in potentially becoming developers down the road (especially underrepresented). I find when you're just getting started there's a confidence issue where having a mentor rooting you on makes a huge difference.

I've heard that the big issue is when people provide unreliable assistance but require significant up-front investment in time from the charity.

Nonprofits don't want to spend a significant amount of time in meetings figuring out how that ideal app should work if there's a realistic chance you'll end up too busy to implement it.

There are places like The Knowledge House: https://www.theknowledgehouse.org/

Depending on where you're located, there may be something similar near you. These sorts of things are great for mentoring / tutoring folks from a variety of backgrounds.

I think most benefit would be to come in as a consultant or trainer for a few hours. Share some of the best practices from your world and create some knowledge transfer to similar professionals in the nonprofit world. Nonprofits tends to be behind for profit when it comes to things like source control, project management, and architecture.

One way could be to work with a tech collective that supports different causes. Riseup (riseup.net) is one. It may be more of sysadmin and platform work than developing apps though.

Unless you can commit for a longer term, it probably may not be worth their while.

A relative of mine and her friends run an NGO who could use some scripting/data science skills. They audit how the government spends their euros in healthcare, keeping them in check when corruption rears its head. (contact in profile)

Do whatever you are interested in. You want to help students or animals or prison reform groups, etc. Find organizations, look at their volunteer needs or email them. Then get to work. Otherwise, work in common tools.

It might sound boring, but most charities and NPOs need very basic web help. Getting a site online + hosting it for a year is in the realm of ~$120, but actually finding the time to do that is a lot of work.

I have a GPL project that I would appreciate even some basic commits from another person. I am not registered as anything, but it is intended to help people and I don't intend to charge for it.

I love https://rubyforgood.org/ they organize projects so there can be real impact.

https://brigade.codeforamerica.org/

you can't donate your time. my understanding is, it's not tax-deductible.

Charities are generally incompetent at managing projects, building and maintaining products.

Considering teaching instead.

Check out Big Brothers Big Sisters mentorship program, I think your contribution there could be more impactful.