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Ask HN: Charity to pair tech mentors with interns to dive into non-profits

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11–20 of 26 posts

Re: Ask HN: Charity to pair tech mentors with interns to dive into non-profits

#11
Hey plam, funny that you mention this — I'm currently building something slightly similar (platform-wise).

Background: I help run CoderDojo NYC and we're always looking for technical volunteers to help at our events. After speaking with a few other teach-kids-to-code organizations, we realized that they had the same problem.

Our solution: https://github.com/carlsednaoui/nycio (it's a work in progress). It will look like this: http://www.nyc.io/ Everything is open-sourced — we're also looking for more contributors if anybody wants to help.

How to get volunteers? We're partnering up with NYTM to build the tech volunteer pool and help them connect with organizations. You could imagine doing the same on your end but with different schools and organizations (happy to send intros where relevant).

Let me know what you think. If you want to chat more we can connect via email @gmail...com

Re: Ask HN: Charity to pair tech mentors with interns to dive into non-profits

#12
post #7

Student interns also want to get paid. Is that going to be a part of this formula? Or is it just looking for free work in students?

what student would get is a tech mentor and a chance to solve real problem with a good cause. wouldn't that be a competitive selling point vs. a paid internship with perhaps a few thousand dollars? Perhaps I'm being naive / optimistic?

It depends what kind of students you want to get. A lot of start ups can make that same argument and pay for the top quality talent (with more than a few thousand dollars).

What I would look at is teaming up with universities and professors and see if you can get students to work in teams on a non-profit project for school credit (possibly as capstone projects?). It allows you to side-step the whole salary and competing with internships thing, and gives students a chance to get real world experience during the school year. Of course that creates the new problem of finding a progressive enough university to sponsor that kind of program, but it's an interesting avenue to explore.

Re: Ask HN: Charity to pair tech mentors with interns to dive into non-profits

#13
Interesting that you mention this. I'm currently 'donating' my time to two non-profits as a strategy mentor. I'm helping them in a similar way a start-up mentor would help a start-up (they're new enterprises).

Both of them need tech talent and are struggling. Would love to discuss this with you further.

Re: Ask HN: Charity to pair tech mentors with interns to dive into non-profits

#14
This sounds like a good thing to do. Many non-profits just want simpler projects like a website redesign done by someone capable, so those projects might be perfect for a developer and an intern to get done fairly quickly, while still being a learning experience for the intern. One group I know that does this is HandsOn Tech Boston. [1] They match volunteers with non-profits to do projects similar to what I described below. Another key component of what they do is technical training for non-profits. They teach fairly simple things like how to use the Wordpress Admin tool well that seem trivial to HN, but are extremely valuable to the non-profits as it means they can maintain their own website. The people there are very friendly, and would probably be up to chat about how to run a successful program.

I'm not totally sure what the demand is for writing other custom software for non-profits, but I'm sure there are plenty of groups who need stuff beyond websites. It would be great if some of the stuff as a result of this project ended up as open source. It would allow other people to continue building it, and would also give the interns experience with version control, and something an employer can look at in depth.

[1] http://www.handsontechboston.org/

Re: Ask HN: Charity to pair tech mentors with interns to dive into non-profits

#15
I had a similar idea a few months ago when I was looking to do some volunteer work. Rather than volunteering at a soup kitchen, or other "unskilled" task I wanted to find an organization where I could volunteer my knowledge of business development, marketing and web dev.

My first thought was to look at websites such as http://www.volunteermatch.org/ . What I found was that the organizations typically requested website redesigns (often using wordpress as the backend) and help with social media management. The time commitment of these opportunities were as you stated above, longer term requiring a few months. The scope of work provided was often inadequate and would require you to contact the organization for details.

Solution:

Create a guide on how to assess requirements and create a proper scope of work for projects, the organization seeking volunteers would submit this as part of their application[1]. Then have a volunteer that would make an appointment to speak with the organization and refine this SOW into a workable project.

Once the project was accepted and requirements laid out; open the opportunity for contributors to offer their time and create a core team to start the project. For website redesign/management use a common codebase that could be reused for projects which would reduce the on-boarding process. This would also allow general documentation and training materials to be created so the management of the website could be transitioned to a full-time volunteer/employee of the organization.

Once the common core was developed and a repo created, issues/tasks would be created and open for contribution which would give devs willing to volunteer a few hours some opportunities to contribute.

I think a handful of well written guides for marketing, social media management, front-end/backend documentation and possibly even basic web design tutorials would go a long way towards improving organizations. A second level of this would be to have recurring roundtable meetings (google hangouts?) where more general individual problems could be addressed allowing for the main project scopes to be slimmed down.

1. Also, works as a weeding out process by requiring a deeper commitment. Organizations would have to to follow to guide, watch a video and think through their needs as opposed to posting a paragraph asking for help.

Related experienced dev/intern pairing program: A non-profit named Launch Code (http://launchcode.us/) was recently started by Jim McKelvey (co-founder of Square) that places new developers with companies for paid pair-programming internship.

Re: Ask HN: Charity to pair tech mentors with interns to dive into non-profits

#16
post #4

Student interns also want to get paid. Is that going to be a part of this formula? Or is it just looking for free work in students?

that depends. to pay students I would need to source funding too. that is doable but does add another level of barrier to get things going. I'll probably start with finding unpaid to get a few batch going, gain momentum, then if all is well, we can start looking for funding.

After you have a few batches, you could self-fund the initiative by offering the same services to for-profit companies and use the profits from those projects to cover the non-profit projects. Almost like a Tom's style model, "for every hour you buy we are able to provide X hours to a paid intern. By choosing us for your next project you are supporting education and non-profit organizations across the country."

Re: Ask HN: Charity to pair tech mentors with interns to dive into non-profits

#17
post #12
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

what student would get is a tech mentor and a chance to solve real problem with a good cause. wouldn't that be a competitive selling point vs. a paid internship with perhaps a few thousand dollars? Perhaps I'm being naive / optimistic?

It depends what kind of students you want to get. A lot of start ups can make that same argument and pay for the top quality talent (with more than a few thousand dollars). What I would look at is teaming up with universities and professors and see if you can get students to work in teams on a non-profit project for school credit (possibly as capstone projects?). It allows you to side-step the whole salary and compet…

I think this is a great idea and is exactly how capstone projects were generated for my entrepreneurship major.

A form was available for local businesses to request help for strategic planning. The owner would submit their proposed project and expected outcome. The professor gave students a survey to get a general idea of sectors and topics the students were interested in. He would take the survey results into account and select enough companies for every team to have 3-5 people.

A brief of each company was written with the general project scope and distributed to students. Students would rank the top 3 projects they wished to work on and were then assigned teams.

Mentors with experience in each businesses particular industry would be assigned to teams to provide expert opinion.

I think the problem would be the need to have projects that were "capstone level" if you intended to have computer science majors doing this. Apps, scheduling widgets and other technical projects may satisfy this but website creation or redesign would not.

A better avenue might be to work with coding bootcamps; as they would have mentors in place and are focused on more entry level websites and applications.

Re: Ask HN: Charity to pair tech mentors with interns to dive into non-profits

#19
post #17
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It depends what kind of students you want to get. A lot of start ups can make that same argument and pay for the top quality talent (with more than a few thousand dollars). What I would look at is teaming up with universities and professors and see if you can get students to work in teams on a non-profit project for school credit (possibly as capstone projects?). It allows you to side-step the whole salary and compet…

I think this is a great idea and is exactly how capstone projects were generated for my entrepreneurship major. A form was available for local businesses to request help for strategic planning. The owner would submit their proposed project and expected outcome. The professor gave students a survey to get a general idea of sectors and topics the students were interested in. He would take the survey results into accoun…

lots of great suggestions here! I'll reach out to local schools, bootcamps, etc. to get some feedback

Re: Ask HN: Charity to pair tech mentors with interns to dive into non-profits

#20

Interesting that you mention this. I'm currently 'donating' my time to two non-profits as a strategy mentor. I'm helping them in a similar way a start-up mentor would help a start-up (they're new enterprises). Both of them need tech talent and are struggling. Would love to discuss this with you further.

drop me an email please paul@quantisan.com

I'd love to hear of your experience.

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