Ask HN: Best way to “donate” dev hours to charity?

[akmarinov]

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

[tyingq]

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.

[narag]

I second that. People working in small scale down-to-earth charities often needs practical immediate help.

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.

[etna_ramequin]

Sounds like a great idea! What sort of questions did you ask during the interview?

[KRAKRISMOTT]

Can you bill the time as a tax write-off?

[brianbreslin]

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.

[dbg31415]

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.

[JStanton617]

This exactly. For most small non-profs, basic IT upkeep - i.e. cleaning adware, patching vulns, getting backups set up and tested - is going to be so much useful than occasional airdropped code with no regular/timely maintenance plan

[brudgers]

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.

[thenipper]

Having worked at an NGO doing data work for years, this. Sadly most charities aren't in a position to easily accept outside professional help for a variety of reasons. Going down and doing work at a soup kitchen or just donating $$ will have a larger impact.

[throwayayes_2]

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

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!

[heffer]

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.

[kiliantics]

this is another great one for teaching tech skills, specifically at high schools in lower income areas: https://codenation.org/

[humanistbot]

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.

[yreg]

This is usually the most efficient approach in regards of impact.

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.

[Orinocco]

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

[mos_6502]

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/

[goldfeld]

Relatedly, but not charity itself, I try to stimulate open source communities by issuing a periodical[0] with easy tasks for beginners to contribute. By getting new people into open source they can hopefully become long term vectors for good work.

0: https://generativereview.substack.com/p/tasks-open-source-em...

[throwayayes_2]

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

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!

[beckingz]

What measures to rehabilitate the scene have you found most effective?

[haolez]

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.

[n4r9]

For context, Carlos Slim amassed his fortune by building monopolies in Mexico whilst its GDP and average income fared poorly. The country's landline suffered from high usage fees as a consequence. Very dubious whether he is a net positive for the world.

See Wikipedia and associated links: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carlos_Slim#Reactions

[SamBam]

But then you get folks like Sam Bankman-Fried, who long claimed exactly this as his motivation for his crypto business.

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?

[pella]

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

[bkazez]

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

[tootie]

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.

[rektide]

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/

[kazz]

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

[kacperlukawski]

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.

[shortrounddev]

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

[senthilnayagam]

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.

[jakevoytko]

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.

[vivegi]

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.