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

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/

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!

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. :-)

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.