How could a programmer contribute to your industry?

How about the preservation of books? I'm working on converting scans (OCR and otherwise) of long out of date, public domain books to a clean digital form (web, PDF, and ePUB) and the hours upon hours of editing typos made by OCR seems like something a large language model or contextual syntax and spelling analyzer should be able to easily sniff out and correct easily enough. My goal is just to preserve knowledge in as compact a format as possible (along with the basis for a clean re-publishing effort if someone wanted to take that on).

The US DoD is very much a rules-governed organization; at its size, it has to be. Unfortunately, its size and scope means that there are so many written rules that no one could know all or most of the rules, and a lifelong high achiever might know most rules within his domain. This means that it's a capriciously rules-governed organization, lending it flexibility and rigidity each in all the wrong places.

The whole organization desperately needs effective lookup within those instructions, manuals, and directives. You could achieve a steeper learning curve within silos and some rudimentary ability to understand silos you interact with. A sign of progress would be seeing all coordination accompanied by reference numbers for the relevant rules, instructions, etc.

Edit: there's a lot that's classified in defense work, of course, but plenty is unclassified and even readily accessible on the internet without credentials. And all that stuff is what screws up HR, pay, and work travel experiences for just about everyone in the organization.

Charities create community for marginalized people, through one-on-one outreach, holding community kitchens, operating thrift stores or bicycle repair shops, or operating shelters or supportive housing. We discover how people survive with creativity and difficulty when they are "alternatively economied", and we create connections between people to keep them alive and offer them hope.

We use I.T. including software much as any other paper-pushing corporate entity, except: paying for software and its care and feeding takes food out of mouths, so we don't like to do that if we don't have to, and; we don't have much use for the software intrigues that pass for productivity and wealth creation.

Software pain points are bad for everybody, but some have training junkets, and some do not. Things like: performative or intrusive licensing asks; yet another cloud account; mandatory UIs with no equivalent API/CLI; layers of awkward cruft papering over legacy functionality that should have been discontinued decades ago (a certain backup package comes to mind); gratuitous UI changes. These are nano-distractions, but they add up for orgs. and workers who don't have much in the tank to begin with.

We do have some interesting proprietary needs. For instance, street-involved people often go under several different names: your average CMS might allow that with a plugin, but it's so niche it might not induce anyone to build it (or worse, we try ineptly ourselves). Password/account recovery workflows are absolutely torturous for people who are anxious, depressed, neurodivergent. I once tried to guide a man with anger issues to fix a copy and paste mistake; he gave up and stormed off and, as a result of missing a deadline, probably wound up in prison, with a decade of knock-on effects.

We rely on Free software--we adore simple, functional, administer-able packages that don't distract or use dark patterns--so that is a way you could contribute to our industry. Another way would be advocacy: government asks us to use lots of software that marketing pushes relentlessly even as it sabotages its functionality, so drawing on your experience to make government aware they're captured would help immensely (we don't have the time or literacy, and we can't bite that hand).