Ask HN: How can I do social good through programming?

The flaw in this way of thinking is hidden in your assumption about what counts as "doing something." You talk as if the only thing that counts as doing something is what you call "change", which means "changing the way that other people (people with more resources than you) act". It's true that engaging in political action to change the way that other people act is an effective and important part of doing good. The government and large corporations control most of the "surplus" resources in the world and it's foolish to pretend otherwise.

But to approach the problem of "doing good" with the mindset of "the only thing that I can do is to ask other people to make the world a better place" is selling yourself short and in my opinion an anti-democratic way of thinking.

Individuals can do exactly what they can do. You can volunteer at a school, you can start a community garden, you can help just one person in your life who needs it. This counts as doing good, and without the kind of community that forms from lots of people spending their time with others, you have to ask yourself why you should care about the political action at all. Far too much political action today is done out of self-righteousness or anger, rather than out of love. If you've forgotten how to love a stranger in your private life, you may have forgotten how to do it in your public (political) life too.

For an in depth talk about the affect of directing your salary to charity check out the following Tech Talk by Toby Ord: "How Many Lives Can You Save? -- Taking Charity Seriously"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iGCVRA7T7FE

They talk about using the metric of "how many lives can be saved" with your cash.

ABSTRACT

People admire doctors and rescue workers and marvel at the possibility of saving someone's life -- something that few of us would ever achieve. And yet at the same time, we routinely hear that for a small sum of money we could save someone's life in a developing country and this scarcely impacts our behaviour. There is an important disconnect between these two attitudes and it has serious moral implications. I will speak about the evidence which shows that we really can make a tremendous difference by giving, and then explore the moral case for giving much more than we typically do. I will then look at the great disparity in effectiveness between different charities and show how choosing where to give can be even more important than the decision to give in the first place.

To echo a previous comment, the absence of one does not make it lesser or undesirable. This is not a zero sum game.

> it's pretty clear that filling in "white people" would make this statement unacceptable

Of course that's unacceptable because it's an implied norm and saying so explicitly is offensive.

If I may suggest? Consider it this way:

"Black and brown people are especially welcome because of their history, life experiences, and unique viewpoints towards something that has historically affected their community's everyday existence ... in addition to the more common applicants (white males)"

NOT:

"Black and Brown people: yay. White people: booooo"

yes. the world would be a much much better place had a non-corporate version of facebook had become facebook.

Our non-profit builds Councilmatic - https://www.councilmatic.org/ - free & open-source tech for city-level civic engagement. Closing the feedback loop with local government, accessible tools for community dialogue.

But in my ten years' experience, here's what I see as the biggest potential for tech for social good: open data standards for constituent communications. Breaking public messages out of the current silo's of individual e-mails, e-petitions, social media, civic tech apps, and issue advocacy platforms. Making possible open structured data on real public priorities and policy preferences in every Congressional district. This never took off because government offices haven't wanted such a level of participatory democracy, and because existing advocacy groups haven't wanted to share membership lists and enable peer-to-peer organizing - it would undercut the business models of e-petition companies and legacy advocacy vendors and VC-backed civic startups. But making public opinion info more free and open for analysis could push forward reforms that have wide support, and are stymied by the current U.S. two-party system: http://www.participatorypolitics.org/open-data-infrastructur...