

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

I can get everything in place to spin out a partnership project. What I lack is time and experience (haven&#x27;t tried this before). So I&#x27;m asking for help to iron this out so as not to waste anyone&#x27;s efforts. I would love to get some feedback on this project &#x2F; model please.<p>Background: I&#x27;m a tech cofounder of a startup (unrelated). I&#x27;ve been talking to an international non-profit on the side as a pro bono service. We&#x27;ve come to the following problems.<p>Problems:
1) Nonprofits have lots of technical needs, things they want built, etc. But they have limited resources.
2) Developers can build things but typically have limited availability so cannot engage with longer term charity projects (about 3 months)<p>Observation:
1) Developers want to help.
2) Developers can offer other things than coding.
3) Who have time and want to build things? Student interns...<p>Solution:
Pair up experienced developers with interns, to form small 2-3 person teams and dive into non-profits.<p>Benefits:
Developer learn to take on CTO role and do good.
Intern gets to solve real problems under guidance of mentor.
Non-profit get to make use of technologies to solve their problems.
======
ericathegreat
I love the principle of IT people helping non profits, but having worked in
non profits numerous times I think there's a problem with these sorts of plans
that most people don't think of.

For any given technology solution, most of its life is spent in maintenance
mode. In the simple case, say you as a developer build a new widget for the
organization's website. You finish it, feel chuffed, and move on.

One month later, the organization needs something new added to it, or there's
a security vulnerability in the tool you used to build it which needs to be
patched, or the API the widget was connecting to got upgraded and it's stopped
working.

The organization now has three options:

\- Hope for another volunteer who can come along and fix the thing which was
broken. Hint - this never happens. Tech volunteers almost always want to offer
their skills on greenfields projects or exciting extensions to functionality,
not mundane business-as-usual work.

\- Pay a consulting company to make the change for them. This gets very
expensive very fast, because _consulting company_.

\- Stop using whatever you built in the first place. This often has huge
business implications by this point, because having trained everyone how to
use this new tech you now have to take a step backwards and stop using it.
Instant resentment of the system which put this in place.

As annoying as it is as developers that we can't volunteer our services for a
few weeks then disappear, that's just not how IT systems work. A system is not
finished until it's been retired or replaced by something else, and if you're
providing something to a non-profit which does not have an in house IT team to
manage the software through the rest of its lifecycle, you're basically
donating a liability.

Even if that's not the case, you're dealing with people who don't necessarily
view or understand technology the way that you do. You could spend several
months building what you think they need, then you come back and they say they
wanted something else, or some substantial modification to what you've built.
You don't have time to dedicate to it any more, they don't have what they
want, and both parties go away dissatisfied.

I'm saying this as a developer who has been involved with several non-IT non
profits, including my current one which I've been working with for over 6
years now. I frequently do volunteer dev work for that project, but even the
most self-sustaining piece of software I ever set up for them still needs
someone to go in there once a year or so and apply software patches and
security fixes, and every six months or so their requirements change in some
way or another and I have to dive back in to accommodate. "Three month"
volunteers are almost always much less help then you would expect them to be.

~~~
plam
That's a very real problem I totally forgot. We could do the same thing and
have a small team of interns + mentor do maintenance mode work.... but not
exactly exciting. I don't know. Any idea?

------
draker
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/](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/](http://launchcode.us/)) was recently started by Jim
McKelvey (co-founder of Square) that places new developers with companies for
paid pair-programming internship.

------
natdempk
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/](http://www.handsontechboston.org/)

------
carlsednaoui
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](https://github.com/carlsednaoui/nycio)
(it's a work in progress). It will look like this:
[http://www.nyc.io/](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
<username>@gmail...com

~~~
plam
email sent

------
s9ix
Currently work at both a nonprofit and a startup, so this is fairly
interesting.

I think for something like this to work, you'd have to get approval for a
project and the scope/timeline before anyone is on-boarded. I'm fairly
fortunate where I work, but a lot of times, getting buy-in can take long and
be a rather painful process.

Also, do you have a scope of what type of things can be built? It would be
beneficial to work out of a common Github/etc. so that future projects can
build off of previous, and updates can be rolled out this way. For example, I
know an organization I used to work with wanted a simple reception app -
schedule an appointment, and it sends out reminders via text and/or email on
the timing, and then it can also be used to check in. This would be simple
using Twilio/Tropo and could be super easy to save in a state for other orgs
to plug in and start using.

Great idea by the way - excited to see where this goes :)

~~~
plam
yes, a large part of it is figuring out the problems and where are the lower
hanging fruits and what resources are needed.

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dirkc
Hey plam - I think it is a good idea. I like the project based approach of
getting mentors to help interns learn while working on useful projects.

There are many challenges: finding mentors, finding good projects, managing
the projects, etc. But I think they can be addressed.

There are some other people that would be interested in your idea at P2PU. If
you'd like, share your idea on thepeople.p2pu.org

------
krmmalik
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.

~~~
plam
drop me an email please paul@quantisan.com

I'd love to hear of your experience.

~~~
krmmalik
Email sent :)

------
sycren
So as one of the organisers of the Hack4Good hackathons (hack4good.io) dealing
with partnerships with charities & sponsors, how can I help you? :)

~~~
plam
do you have a few minute to chat in the next few weeks? drop me an email
please paul@quantisan.com

------
tylermac1
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?

~~~
plam
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?

~~~
bcaine
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.

~~~
draker
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.

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

------
dnnrly
Sounds reasonable on the face of it. Are you proposing to build a service to
do this matching?

~~~
plam
not yet, but probably eventually. I'll start with just doing it for a project
first to test out the model. I have a nonprofit on board with needs. I have
connections with developers. I can find an intern. I can get most of it in
place but lack time and experience (haven't done this before). So I want your
help to iron out the model as much as possible to not waste time.

~~~
dirkc
You should have a look at
[https://www.catchafire.org/](https://www.catchafire.org/). They help match up
interns and non-profits (for a fee that is).

