Cloud to Street (for WFP):

Cloud to Street is the leading dynamic flood mapping system designed to enable the world's most vulnerable communities to prepare for and respond to climate catastrophes. We harness global satellites, machine learning, and community intelligence to monitor floods in near realtime around the world and remotely analyze local flood exposure at a fraction of the cost and time of traditional flood mapping. Our mission is to ensure that all vulnerable governments can finally access the high quality information they need to prepare and respond to increasing catastrophes. Today 11 national governments are using Cloud to Street and we are on track to enable new flood protection and insurance for 10 million people in the next 5 years.

We are currently partnering with The World Food Programme in Sri Lanka to provide an online decision support tool and flood alert system for the national government.

Core challenge:

One of the primary functions of the Cloud to Street platform is to deliver actionable information in a user-friendly way quickly enough for decision making. As Cloud to Street begins to operate in an increasing number of regions, we are constantly in tension between making the platform scalable and replicable while also allowing for enough customization to address users’ unique needs. Moreover, with scientific advancement at Cloud to Street continues, we need to integrate new analyses and data pipelines into the existing platform.

We are looking for help from a software developer to help scale and improve the backend architecture and user interface of the Cloud to Street Platform. Operating the platform in many places requires the infrastructure to be robust and efficient and include all necessary monitoring tools to ensure uninterrupted service. In addition, we need help adding features into our user-interface based on client feedback and an ongoing user-experience evaluation.

Current organization tech stack

• Python backend on Google Compute Engine with automated tasks manage with Cloud Scheduler, data stored in Google Cloud Storage and reporting logs sent to Slack
• Data processing either done on GCE VM with GDAL or in Google Earth Engine
• Angular front-end with OpenLayers for web mapping, multi-tenant hosting managed with Firebase for custom deployments in multiple regions at once

Project 1 - Architecture Review

Description

Review platform architecture and make improvements to processing workflows. Help make software more portable and easily replicable by standardizing and automating project setup process and using tools such as Docker. Adding additional system monitoring tools.

Skills

• Python
• Automated workflows in Google Cloud Ecosystem (GCE, GCS, Cloud Scheduler)
• Docker

Impact
This will help us address issues limiting the number of deployments we can operate at once and ensure reliable operation for the clients as we scale to more regions.

Timeline
August through September

Project 2 - Frontend Data Visualization Support

Description
Iterate on user interface for data visualization and delivery. Add features to user interface for controlling how layers appear, data visualization and data interaction. Make interface more user friendly by adding a site tour, tool tips, and adjusting application workflow based on input from users and user experience director. Making some features of the platform more customizable per location. Add the ability to visualize cloud optimized GeoTiffs on web map. Lastly, many of our clients are in developing countries with limited bandwidth, so we need help optimizing load speed and minimizing latency in low-bandwidth settings.

Skills

• Angular
• Firebase and Cloudflare
• OpenLayers and geospatial data visualization

Impact
These additions will help make our tool more usable by developing nations for decision making in real time and planning.

Timeline
August through September

Project 3 - Data Processing Improvements

Description
Improve data processing performance and database structure. This task involves adding parallelized computing to increase processing efficiency, switching raster format to cloud optimized GeoTiffs for data analysis, delivery, and visualization. This also involves building a more structured database architecture (currently in Google Cloud Storage) with different types of data in different formats for easier querying, organization, and delivery.

Skills

• Python
• Cloud and high performance computing
• Geospatial analysis
• Firebase and Google Cloud Platform

Impact
This will have a direct impact on how frequently we can monitor zones that are at risk and inform relevant stakeholders.

Timeline
August through October

What to expect?

We have a current dashboard and other communications processes, as well as a high level strategy document outlining the goals of the user’s experience of our product. We expect the volunteer to do a thorough review of our dashboard and other communications to the Sri Lankan government by using our material and talking with us. We’d also like a few sessions where they lead us through questions we should consider when researching our users. They should iteratively provide suggestions over the phone, in writing and as drawn wireframes that we can immediately develop and test out with user. Ideally, we would do 2-3 rounds of build, test, feedback with the volunteer.

Next Steps

• You love this organization and their projects? Send us an email at [email protected] now and we will introduce you to the team after reviewing your profile!
• Questions? Simply leave a comment and ask!

Globe Smart Kids ibelieves that transformative social change starts in a child’s imagination. Our mission is to make the foreign feel familiar to children worldwide. We do that by offering programs that translate academic research on intergroup contact into digital play experiences for young children, designed to help them grow up feeling safe, happy and excited about interacting with diverse others. One Globe Kids is our core program. The One Globe Kids program is an innovative simulated friendship experience for young children, currently including: ‘My Country’ stories, interactive activities, and education resources.

Core Challenge

The more children we reach around the world and the better we can make One Globe Kids feel like a true friendship experience, the more impact the program will have. We are a small team of remote working changemakers around the world. Difficulties that have prevented the tech projects from moving forward faster: secure funding for tech updates, time and lack of expert tech knowledge.

Projects

Replace Flash: One Globe Kids interactive stories and friendship activities are used by schools, children age 4-10, K-5, on notebooks, smartboards and tablets. They currently only work with up to date Flash player installed. This prevents some schools from using the program and makes access on tablets impossible. The goal of this project is to rebuild the online One Globe Kids friends platform, replace Flash and make it all responsive.

Flash makes the platform outdated and unusable for some. Replacing Flash and rebuilding the platform will make One Globe Kids accessible in all browsers and on more devices. At the same time, it might also be an opportunity to update the look and feel of it all. An updated friendship experience will increase the impact of One Globe Kids on prejudice and bias in young children, will help Globe Smart Kids generate more program income and reach more children around the world.

Core Skills Needed

Frontend web-developer, with skills in JAVAScript, HTML5, CakePHP and frameworks like Angular, React, jQuery or similar

Current Tech Stack

• The website is a combination of Wordpress & Memberpress linked to a custom made One Globe Kids friends platform with custom made CMS, incl: LAMP, Javascript, jQuery, CakePHP, HTML, CSS. And Flash.
• The custom CMS is also input for the iOS apps that are currently in the Apple App Store.

What to expect?

Sign up to try One Globe Kids for free at www.oneglobekids.org and you will get access to two friends: Larasati in Indonesia and Valdo in Haiti. We have done some UX research with both children and adults. We have a wishlist of changes and you will probably find things to add. However, replacing Flash is the core of this project. We would love to hear from you how you would approach this rebuild and are open to your ideas. We communicate best via Slack and/or Basecamp. We practice what we preach, expect to work with an international team: different humor, accents, time zones and paper sizes. And lots of chats about good food.

Project contact Sanny Zuiderveld, Co-Founder and Director of Marketing and Technology

Arkhn

Today, it still is really hard for medical practitioners to have a good sense of their patients' history, leading to approximately 10 000 deaths on the French soil every year due to medicinal errors.
The main problem Arkhn is trying to solve is to enable healthcare facilities to safely communicate information.
Arkhn thus builds open-source data standardization and integration tools for hospitals. We deploy our solution on-premise so as to build a decentralized network of communicating hospitals.

Core Challenge

We are currently building a scalable cluster solution to be deployed in hospitals. We use tools such as Spark, Hive, ElasticSearch, GraphQL, Hapi, PyTorch and Pysyft. We would greatly benefit from other peoples' expertise in data integration and cluster deployment.

It takes a lot of time to convince hospitals to use such technologies, which is our first difficulty in this project. The time gain we could find having experts giving us pieces of advise on our product architecture would be a great plus!

Current Tech Stack

• Spark
• Hive
• GraphQL
• Python

--> https://explore.ovio.org/project?name=arkhn/fhir-pipe

Are you looking for more inspiration? Visit Explore by Ovio or checkout other opportunities here.

Open Law Library is a non-profit dedicated to making the law available to all in human- and computer-readable formats. We have built the Open Law Platform to empower governments to easily and rapidly publish their laws in open and free digital-native formats.

Core Challenge

We are taking the tools and techniques developed for programmers to publish software code - IDEs, linters, compilers, continuous integration/deployment, VCS, etc - and adapting and transforming them for use by lawyers to publish legal codes. We have two major challenges: (1) As our “code base” of laws grows (over 1.2m “LoC” and growing), we need to constantly improve our tooling to draft, annotate, navigate, compile, and understand the laws published on our platform; and (2) because we are working with official laws, security, auditability, and preservation are vital.

Projects

• Cryptographic Authentication of Laws on Decadal timescale Open Law Library publishes all laws as GIT repositories, and these laws need to be cryptographically authenticatable. GIT signing has a number of issues. We are building a tool called The Archive Framework. We are looking for security experts who are interested in helping us build, secure, test, and/or audit this system. This project will make it possible for governments to easily publish versioned laws. This is a vital prerequisite for digitally publishing official laws.
• DevOps Improvements We launched websites for our first two partner jurisdictions in 2018. We plan to launch for at least 10 more this year. Each partner’s website is customized. We host everything on AWS, and use Terraform/Packer/Ansible to create similar-but-not-identical environments for each partner. We are not DevOps people, but have been teaching ourselves. It would be incredibly helpful to have a volunteer with deep DevOps experience who could review our stack, help us incrementally improve our architecture design, and then help us implement those improvements.This will make it possible for us to not only rapidly onboard new jurisdictions (and thus publish more laws in open, accessible formats), but also ensure that we serve the needs of our existing clients.
• ML/AI for automated lawyer assistance Each law can be thought of as a change set. We would like to use ML/AI to create a model to, given a location in the document, predict the codification instruction that describes that location of the document. Since These codification instructions need to be 100% correct, we would use this model to provide autocomplete within the IDE that would then be reviewed immediately by the attorney. This system will reduce the time it takes attorneys to perform basic codification tasks, freeing their time to perform higher-value annotations, improving the usefulness of the open laws published on the platform.

Core Skills Needed

R, Machine Learning/Artificial Intelligence, DevOps, Security Experts; GIT Experts.

Current Tech Stack

• DevOps: AWS; terraform, packer, ansible
• Drafting IDE (Word plugin for lawyers) - C# VSTO; React; flask
• Codification IDE (language server/ VS Code client) - Python (pygls); typescript
• Codification engine and static site/document generator - Python/lxml
• Dynamic website components: Vue; Python (django); OpenResty
• Authentication of laws: Python (TUF, TAF)

What to expect?

Open Law Library is a fully remote team. We work on a mix of open source and proprietary software. If you are working on the proprietary codebase (DevOps project), we will ask you to sign a narrow confidentiality and IP assignment agreement. If you are working on open source code bases (Authentication and ML/AI projects), all your work will be under the licenses of the respective projects. Our fully remote team uses GitHub issues for asynchronous communication, slack and hangouts for limited synchronous communication, and tests and CI servers to maintain code quality. We pride ourselves on being friendly and welcoming, and continuously striving to improve our processes. The domain is very complicated, so we are looking for people who are already experts in their respective technical fields and are excited to learn a new problem domain and apply their expertise to it.

Project contact David Greisen, Founder and CEO

Get In Touch!

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Ready to contribute or interested in learning more?
Give us a call or send us an email and we will get back to you as soon as possible!

Zariyaindia is a Tech nonprofit that helps women in India who face domestic violence. We connect women with legal and counseling help near them based on their needs and zipcode. The fundamental problem at hand is the large gap between women who need help and the organizations that provide help. We are bridging this gap by infusing this ecosystem with much-needed technology. We are designing the end-to-end journey to recovery that a woman goes through via two products: A marketing website where women can learn more about us and use our chatbot to reach out for help. The goal of this website to make women feel safe to reach out to us and know that there is confidential help available for free. A case management system (also a website) that is used by the Zariya team and the NGOs we partner with. This is where cases are managed by our counselor partners by adding notes, assigning cases, updating statuses, etc. By making help free and easily accessible, we want to encourage more women to speak up and get the help they need. We are a small team of volunteers who work remotely. So far we have received over 500 cases from major cities in India like Mumbai, Hyderabad, Bangalore and Delhi. We have received a small grant from the Stanford Haas Center as well as prize money from the 3M CII Innovator’s challenge in India.

Core Challenge

The case management system (CMS) we have built so far is simple. We haven’t closed the loop on feedback from both survivors and counselors to understand how we can make the experience better for survivors. There are also a lot of useful features we’d like to add that not only make the experience better for counselors using the CMS but also help us measure the quality of our impact.

Projects

• Survivor Feedback: Implement an automated system of collecting feedback from survivors who have been connected with counselors. This could be via email or SMS (using Twilio). We’re looking to understand if a survivor is satisfied with the help she is receiving and other more granular feedback.
• Fields: Implement a generalized architecture for adding fields to each case with possible options for each field. For example, one field that is a must is the Status of the case. This will help us iterate faster and easily customize our CMS to accept new information from counselors.
• Follow: Implement the ability to subscribe to cases so as to receive future updates to that case via notifications. This includes new notes that might be added to a case or if its status changes.

Core Skills Needed

Full-stack engineers with a product-driven mindset. Preferably familiar with Ruby on Rails, React, and Redux.

Current Tech Stack

• React + Redux front end,
• Ruby on Rails backend
• Postgres DB on AWS ElasticBeanstalk

What to expect?

You will be the second engineer on the team besides one of the co-founders. You will build the projects above end-to-end taking full ownership and autonomy. You will be able to see your work in the hands of users and understand the difference it makes to women facing domestic violence and to the women who are helping them.

Project contact Arzav Jain, Co-Founder

WattTime invented Automated Emissions Reduction: a technique to detect pollution free electric moments, and software to sync IoT devices like smart thermostats to shift some of their energy use to these clean times.

Core Challenge

ETL to grab data, machine learning to process it, REST API to deliver it in real time to IoT companies to reduce emissions, web interface to communicate the results.

Projects

• Backend: Help us expand internationally by writing web scrapers to analyze foreign energy grids in real time. Adding web scrapers for more countries will let us deploy our emissions-reducing software via the cloud to people in more places worldwide.
• Frontend: Welp us improve our UI to show in a more intuitive way what our complex software is doing. Improving our UI will help make it more clear to people how this complex new technology works.

Core Skills Needed

Current Tech Stack

• UX/UI
• Python
• Javascript

Project contact David McCormick, Co-Founder and Executive Director

Get In Touch!

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Ready to contribute or interested in learning more?
Give us a call or send us an email and we will get back to you as soon as possible!

CareerVillage is a tech nonprofit based in Palo Alto, CA that crowdsources career advice for youth at massive scale. The problem we solve is that low-income and underrepresented youth lack the networks they need to access basic career advice. This contributes to the career readiness crisis faced by youth in countries around the world. Our solution is crowdsourced Q&A platform just like StackOverflow or Quora, but tailored to the needs of our 3M+ online learners and our 20,000+ registered volunteers. Despite launching just a few years ago, CareerVillage.org has already been recognized with financial support from AT&T, FFWD.org, Google.org, Lumina Foundation, PwC, Verizon and others.

Core Challenge

Even if a small tech nonprofit can put together a high-performing machine learning model, supporting that model in production over months and years requires knowledge, experience, and hard work. How can we help the tech nonprofit CareerVillage.org build the infrastructure, systems, and processes they need to support a mission-critical Machine Learning application for the long run?

Projects

• ML Engineering: Design and build an infrastructure, system, and processes for deploying, monitoring, managing, maintaining, and continuously improving a mission-critical content recommendation machine learning system in production.
• Integration: Integrate the work of a couple of other teams working on smaller pieces of the puzzle such as building the actual recommendation model itself (including a Delta Analytics ML team and a not-yet-confirmed Jan/Feb 2019 Kaggle competition dedicated to CareerVillage.org)
• Thought leadership: Publish publicly any guidelines, blog posts, or appropriate code that other tech nonprofits or startups can use to implement similar systems.

Impact

If successful, this project will enable CareerVillage.org to improve the most important feature of its platform: the ability to effectively match student requests for career advice to the 20,000+ registered volunteers at CareerVillage.org. Even a 1% increase in the accuracy of matches would lead to tens of thousands more students getting personalized career advice over the following 12 months.

Core Skills Needed

Machine Learning Engineering, Project Management, experience working with ML systems in real-world production environments, Python.

Current Tech Stack

• React front end, Python/Django backend, Redis + Postgres db, on AWS EC2+RDS, etc.
• CNN model for topic prediction (using fastText library) on AWS Lambda (managed with Serverless Framework)
• Admin reporting tools: some in Django app, some sent to Google Sheets via Google Docs API.

Project contact Jared Chung, CareerVillage.org Founder (and Python dev!)

RightOn is an app-based classroom activity that increases engagement and helps more students feel better about math: think Kahoot/Fibbage + math + learning from and having fun with wrong answers. Rather than focusing on just increasing math proficiency -- which can leave behind many disengaged and underserved youth -- RightOn! is also working to increase self-confidence and self-efficacy through an engaging activity that applies research into learning from mistakes and common misconceptions.

Core Challenge

The team is planning to develop 2 versions of the app:

1. Current focus: A classroom version similar to Kahoot, where teachers can launch a game on-demand with a closed group of students.
2. In the future: A live game show version similar to HQ Trivia, where students in different schools, cities, or even countries can play at pre-scheduled times each week.

Projects

• Build out features for classroom version We’ve launched a React Native-based prototype that has been piloted in several schools and after-school programs. Our product backlog includes features that enable teachers to better make use of student responses in the RightOn game: e.g., for a given question, what trick answers were generated by students, which of those trick answers were most popular, and what was the underlying rationale for those trick answers.

• Develop a quiz maker for teachers Using student responses from RightOn games, teachers can generate quizzes, saving time while increasing effectiveness. One of the most time-consuming aspects of writing a quiz is not coming up with questions, but rather plausible wrong answers (aka distractors). RightOn simplifies this process by providing teachers with student-generated and student-validated wrong answers that are surfaced in an engaging classroom activity -- fun for students and time-saving for teachers!

• Develop a web-based tool for teachers and RightOn team members to more easily create questions/games Currently, questions are manually added using the DynamoDB UI. We are looking for experienced software developers who can help create a web tool that enables users to easily create, edit, and upload questions into DynamoDB.

Core Skills Needed

We’re looking to work with people who are interested in making a difference in youth education. We are building mobile apps on AWS using technologies including React Native, Node.js, DynamoDB, and Amplify/Lambda. Experience with AI/ML is a plus.

Current Tech Stack

• User flow diagram
• Wireframes
• Prototype - Android (download the release.apk)
• Prototype - iOS (first requires installation of TestFlight)
• Github repo

Classroom Response Systems / Games

• Kahoot
• Quizlet Live
• Fibbage

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Project contact Sinclair Wu, Co-Founder

Get In Touch!

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Ready to contribute or interested in learning more?
Give us a call or send us an email and we will get back to you as soon as possible!

The World Food Programme (WFP) is the food-assistance branch of the United Nations and the world's largest humanitarian organization addressing hunger and promoting food security.

Over the past few years, WFP country offices in the Asian region have implemented technology solutions to monitor climate-driven natural hazards and food and nutrition insecurity in order to provide decision-makers with the most up to date information possible. Through homegrown technology innovation projects, WFP’s country offices in Indonesia, Sri Lanka, and Cambodia, have built platforms to monitor various aspects of food insecurity, including an increased ability to monitor climate-driven hazards through the use of remote-sensing data, and utilization of mobile phones to capture information on the ground and aggregate it for operations decision support.

A few useful links:

• New Vulnerability Monitoring Platform To Assist Drought-Affected Populations In Indonesia
• PRISM (Vampire in Indonesia) Redesign - Blog Post

Core Challenge

While WFP has created platforms which have attracted significant support and have been deployed to governments, the organization does not have sufficient in-house software development skills available to integrate and scale these initiatives to the desired level. WFP’s Regional Bureau for Asia and the Pacific seeks to take the lessons learned and invest in a region-wide solution which can be delivered to governments and partners to mitigate the risks of climate-driven disasters in the region. The effort to centralize all the different platforms into one is called PRISM.

Projects

• To the Cloud: One of the most important step towards the expansion of the program is to develop a strong cloud solution. The software should be easy to deploy and secure.
• Scale: As the scope of the project evolves, so does the interest. PRISM needs to evolve into a scalable and reliable solution.
• Security: A strong negotiation point with government officials is the security of the data and the platform. The platform needs to evolve into a secure web-app.
• Adaptability: PRISM currently has various country specific capabilities. These specificities need to be packaged to ensure that the code is easily adaptable to monitor new areas.

Impact

If successful, this project will enable WFP to greatly accelerate the deployment of PRISM and equip government official and regional country offices with advanced tools to monitor climate-driven natural hazards.

Core Skills Needed

Cloud Architecture, Project Management, Python. Docker.

Current Tech Stack

• PHP frontend, Python backend, Postgres, PostGis + GeoServer db.
• Docker
• AWS (EC2, ECR, Cloud Formation,...)

Project contact Amit Wadhwa, Regional Manager - Remote Sensing Technology for Early Warning / Emergency Response

Get In Touch!

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Ready to contribute or interested in learning more?
Give us a call or send us an email and we will get back to you as soon as possible!

Cloud to Street (for WFP):

Cloud to Street is the leading dynamic flood mapping system designed to enable the world's most vulnerable communities to prepare for and respond to climate catastrophes. We harness global satellites, machine learning, and community intelligence to monitor floods in near realtime around the world and remotely analyze local flood exposure at a fraction of the cost and time of traditional flood mapping. Our mission is to ensure that all vulnerable governments can finally access the high quality information they need to prepare and respond to increasing catastrophes. Today 11 national governments are using Cloud to Street and we are on track to enable new flood protection and insurance for 10 million people in the next 5 years.

We are currently partnering with The World Food Programme in Sri Lanka to provide an online decision support tool and flood alert system for the national government.

Core challenge:

Developing country governments are rarely the focus of world class user experiences or human centered design processes. Yet, good product design makes all the difference in enabling an emergency decision-maker to understands the information they need to in order to act, as opposed to confusing them or preventing them from leveraging critical feedback on the disaster. Cloud to Street has started to do things differently. However, we do not have the expertise in human centered design that we are sure would fully build out the ideal experience for these government users.

We are looking for help from a user experience and human centered design expert to turn our scientific information and technical disaster support tool into an easy-to-use and highly trusted product for the government decision makers, first responders, and vulnerable communities we serve. We need guidance and fresh ideas for developing the next level of our information design vision for the product and prototyping a trusted, intuitive, and immediately useful information service.

Current organization tech stack

• Online dashboards customized for each client with reports on each flood event of concern and web maps with all long term and near realtime data for their area
• WhatsApp messages to a focal group or main point person
• 1 week in person trainings and user design exercises with the government to establish the information flow between the stakeholders and the emergency decision-making process
• Virtual trainings on our data and how to leverage the insights for their specific decisions

Example:

• React front end, Python/Django backend, Redis + Postgres db, on AWS EC2+RDS, etc.
• CNN model for topic prediction (using fastText library) on AWS Lambda (managed with Serverless Framework)
• Admin reporting tools: some in Django app, some sent to Google Sheets via Google Docs API.

Phase 1 - User Experience Definition

Description

Help us develop a vision for the user experience of our disaster users by guiding us and providing feedback as we further define the problems and goals, map the user journeys, and more. Sketch a user flow for our disaster information process for our flood information online UI and push notification messaging for the Sri Lankan government. Help us deploy tests of different designs of the dashboard and style of the messages with the various government stakeholders in Sri Lanka.

Skills

• Human centered design
• User research
• Wireframe development

Impact
We will use this to revamp the user experience for the Sri Lankan government around flood information.

Timeline
August through September

Phase 2 - User Experience Wireframing

Description
Create wireframes and guidance for the messages for our developers to use based on the outcomes of the project above

Skills

• Human centered design
• User research
• Wireframe development

Impact
We will use this to redo the user experience for the Sri Lankan government around flood information

Timeline
August through September

Phase 3 - User Experience KPIs and Tracking

Description
Help us develop a set of KPIs around UX

Skills

• User research
• Metrics and Evaluation

Impact
We will use this process to determine the essential elements of our user’s experience with us and plan what product optimization

Timeline
August through October

What to expect?

We have a current dashboard and other communications processes, as well as a high level strategy document outlining the goals of the user’s experience of our product. We expect the volunteer to do a thorough review of our dashboard and other communications to the Sri Lankan government by using our material and talking with us. We’d also like a few sessions where they lead us through questions we should consider when researching our users. They should iteratively provide suggestions over the phone, in writing and as drawn wireframes that we can immediately develop and test out with user. Ideally, we would do 2-3 rounds of build, test, feedback with the volunteer.

Next Steps

• You love this organization and their projects? Send us an email at [email protected] now and we will introduce you to the team after reviewing your profile!
• Questions? Simply leave a comment and ask.

World Resources Institute

Our vision for the future is to create the “Global Energy Data Commons”, that will inform and shape a global research agenda. We will create actionable, open, and accessible information on the cost, benefits of potential solutions for an affordable, reliable & sustainable energy system.
Our current scope is focused on a open database of power plants and the GitHub repository is available here: https://github.com/wri/global-power-plant-database

Core Challenge

We see the following categories of challenges that the open sources community could help address:

Smaller programming and data collection challenges that require Python skills (approx. 1-4 weeks each)

• Integrate additional data sources (Egypt, Chile, ..)
  Writing data extractors in Python and matching power plants with existing data in the database with elastic search or other methods
• Update existing data sources
  Examine and update data sources that have not been updated for an extended period and adjust existing Python code to update data
• Validate data with satellite images or across data sources
  Write Python code that is extracting satellite tiles for geolocations where power plants are in the database to manually confirm if geolocations are accurate.
• Identify and collect new data manually
  Where automated extraction is not possible, collect, standardize and match power plant data manually from publicly available sources

Technical infrastructure improvements that require Python, data base, data processing or data science skills (approx. 1 - 3 months each)

• Create a flexible relational data model
  The current data model cannot represent one-to-many relationships, which are necessary to store more granular data. A new data model needs to be planned an implemented
• Split up the data processing chain into steps
  The current code is running in one combined processing step. An improved system would separate (modularize) the steps by specific sources, data extraction, intermediate data storing, data matching and final data base creation.

Research projects that require 1-3 people with modeling skills, GIS, and some energy expertise (approx. 3-9 months or longer each)

• Predict other emissions like NO2 from satellite measurements
• TROPOMI data, released to the public in July 2018, allows for precise measurement of air pollution and determination of its chemical components (including NOx emissions).
  Combining this data with the power plant database can enable the creation of a global dataset of daily NOx emissions for large power plants. A reliable dataset of plant location, overlaid with granular information on NOx emissions and other key data layers (topography, wind speed), will allow for the first NOx emissions attribution to individual power plants at the global level. In countries where NOx emission data is not reported, this will provide particularly useful information. Even where NOx emissions are reported, they are rarely as disaggregated as daily.
• Using Natural Language Processing to collect public data
  We propose building an NLP tool that will ingest text-based documents and perform entity and action resolution to pair power plants with indicators that we are currently missing (priority on the companies that own them). There is a large amount of power plant ownership information available online in the form of public financial filings, press releases, news articles, and other text-based documents. The NLP tool will ingest documents and determine (a) which power plant is being described (entity resolution) and (b) the power plant ownership and possibly other characteristics (action resolution).
• Remote sensing to detect cooling type
  Water-use of power plants is a key impact and vulnerability. We have a model to estimate the water use based on cooling type of plants. We propose to build an machine vision algorithm that uses location of plants and satellite imagery to automatically detect cooling type by plants. Training data is available and could be expanded upon.
• Remote sensing to detect wind farms or solar plants
  There has been some research piloted by universities to use machine vision to automatically detect wind farms or solar plants. These models will need to be expanded upon to achieve higher accuracy, increase geographic coverage, extract technical characteristics, integrating them into the power plant database and estimates additional indicators.
• Improve models to predict generation or CO2 emissions
  We have built models to estimate annual generation and emissions by plant. These models represent a first version and can likely be significantly improved.

Restorative Justice Fund is a nonprofit justice reform incubator based in Los Angeles. We advocate for, design, and deploy innovative intervention at every level of the justice system to make it more equitable, effective, and cost-efficient.

Core Challenge

Criminal justice lags far behind almost every other sector in terms of use and adoption of new technology. From courts to prosecutor offices to defendants and their families, the ability to adapt new software tools to better meet the needs of system actors and system-involved people has tremendous potential to improve outcomes system-wide. Nevertheless, most people working in the legal system, in law enforcement, in corrections, and in community-based organizations remain resistant to new tech tools despite the obvious benefit of using them. Therefore, RJFund seeks to partner with passionate coders and developers who understand the promise of technology for the criminal justice system to build the tools of the future while also helping to raise awareness of the value of new technology for the system as a whole.

Projects

• Website Feed Aggregator Content management system that populates a Twitter-like feed on front page of www.rjfund.org with what I save to Pocket, Instapaper, tweets/retweets from @_RJFund, and newsletter.This will be the crown jewel of our website redesign and super important for our supporters and people curious about criminal justice reform to stay up to date and clear on the most important issues in criminal justice reform.

Core Skills Needed

Knowledge of RSS and how to use APIs from the services described above, front web design to make it look nice.

Current Tech Stack

• Squarespace (www.rjfund.org // www.lifer-legal.com)
• Google Docs/Sheets
• Pocket/Instapaper
• Mailchimp
• Donorbox
• Twitter (@_RJFund)
• Heroku (Court Tracker)
• Twilio (Jail Voice Mail)

What to expect?

First of all, RJFund is grateful for any work that volunteers feel called to do for us. We respect your time and expertise and recognize that we simply could not do it without you. With regard to the above-described project, we’d hope first to understand what level of complexity this project entails so we can plan for how hard it will be to execute. However, if it’s a relatively easy project to execute, then we’d expect at least to receive support in implementing it on our website (either on Squarespace or some other platform) and minor ongoing support to make sure that it works and meets our needs.

Get In Touch!

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Ready to contribute or interested in learning more?
Give us a call or send us an email and we will get back to you as soon as possible!

Terrastories

Terrastories is a geostorytelling application built to enable local communities to locate and map their own oral storytelling traditions about places of significant meaning or value to them. Community members can add places and stories through a user-friendly interface, and make decisions about designating certain stories as private or restricted. Built with the Mapbox platform, Terrastories works both online and offline, so that remote communities can access the application entirely without needing internet connectivity.

Terrastories as an organization is currently composed of four core developers, and is being stewarded by the non-profit organization Amazon Conservation Team (ACT). ACT is an NGO working with indigenous people in South America to protect their ancestral rainforests and maintain their traditional culture. In 2017, ACT realized the need to develop a custom interactive mapping application designed for mapping and safeguarding the intangible cultural heritage expressed in indigenous place-based oral histories, which are at risk of disappearing. Currently, three communities in the Amazon are using Terrastories, and there has been global interest in using the app with communities in places like Cameroon, Canada, French Guiana, and Portugal.

Core Challenge

The core challenge that we face is that Terrastories is a SaaS application with both online and offline functionality. We are developing Terrastories as "offline-first" because it is deployed for indigenous communities in the rainforest, with no internet connectivity. Because of that, we face difficulties around supporting a tech stack capable of being deployed online and offline; data backup, safety and export; and a need for p2p syncing between different instances of Terrastories.

Additionally, Terrastories is a currently somewhat burdensome to install, with the need for running lines of code in a bash/shell environment. We need to make it much easier to use Terrastories so that communities themselves can install and use the application without needing technical support.

Current Tech Stack

• Front end: React, Mapbox GL (Tileserver GL in the offline environment), JS, CSS
• Back end: Ruby on Rails CMS, Postgres db, Nginx server, and Docker virtualization
• In its essence, Terrastories is a map-driven content management system that is offline compatible

SubProject 1. Setting up an online instance of Terrastories, with live data

Description

We have a demo of Terrastories at http://terrastories.herokuapp.com/, but this is a free Heroku build of our Github repository, and does not show off Terrastories as well as we would like. There is one community project with a beautiful ancestral lands map with cultural data and demarcations, over 300 stories, and 17 hours of video footage of elders sharing oral histories. We would like to have this hosted online, but password protected. This way, the Terrastories and ACT teams can better demonstrate how Terrastories works to third parties.

Skills

-Azure, AWS
-Server hosting

Impact

One of the biggest measurements we have for success is that third parties are using the application and Terrastories, as a free and open-source project, starts to gain global usage. Having a live demo will help us tremendously in helping other communities across the world see how Terrastories can benefit them. We are networking at the UNESCO 15th Congress on Intangible Cultural Heritage at the end of 2020 and it would be amazing to have a demo up by then.

Timeline

Q2-Q3 2020

SubProject 2. Helping Terrastories set up online and offline dev and production environments

Description

Terrastories is a project under development, and sometimes we are building features for an online environment that don't work offline (and possibly vice versa). We face challenges around how to have both of these environments in one Github repo, and how to ensure that new features work in both.

Skills

-Github repo management
-Docker, Ruby on Rails, Shell
-Potentially, Mapbox GL and Tileserver GL

Impact

It's been a huge challenge to get folks set up with an efficient dev environment that reflects the realities of how Terrastories will be deployed in the field, but also one that is streamlined and easy to set up. It would greatly benefit our devs by helping us figure out an optimal build or setup for the app that lends itself to both offline/online dev and production environments.

Timeline

Anytime is appreciated.

SubProject 3. Helping Terrastories complete test coverage

Description

In Hacktoberfest 2020, we started to set up Tests for Terrastories, and this remains to be completed.

Skills

-Ruby on Rails

Impact

Helping us get full test coverage will make Terrastories a more bug-free and stable app!

Timeline

Anytime is appreciated.

What to expect?

We are a very active team, with four core developers and dozens of other contributors who have helped build Terrastories and continue to give input, or contribute to the codebase from time to time. You will find us to be very responsive and enthusiastic to work with you and helping you get up to speed with how the codebase works. We have a Slack channel #Terrastories, currently hosted on the Ruby for Good Slack (at https://rubyforgood.herokuapp.com/) which is our main communication channel.

Terrastories is a growing project with increasing visibility, and the application was one of the most successful in the Ruby category during Hacktoberfest 2019. We would love to work with you!

Next Steps

Do you like this organization and its project(s)? Send us an email at [email protected] with relevant info about yourself! We will then reach out and introduce you to the right persons.

Are you looking for more inspiration? Visit Explore by Ovio or checkout other opportunities here.

Applied Research in Government Operations builds, operates and maintains pioneering public data infrastructure to transform how basic public services like water efficiency are delivered. We've helped partner California water utilities save over $20 million, informed the optimization of half a billion more and laid the foundation to ensure water reliability no matter what the future holds.

Core Challenge

Our projects have been very successful though could use more engineering resources to help the rocket soar higher, faster.

Projects

• Water Data Analytic Software:
  We deploy open source analytics to help water utilities navigate historic shifts and the generational challenge of climate change. Our tools support agencies in meeting critical goals like water efficiency and revenue stability. You can see our legacy analytics portal here: https://demo.californiadatacollaborative.com/smc We are currently developing a next-generation analytics platform built on top of Python Flask to replace our legacy stack of Rshiny and RMarkdown applications. We are a very lean team and would appreciate more engineering support as well as general mentorship from more experienced engineers or product managers. Data analytics software supporting operational decisions is one of the core pillars of our organization (the other pillars are applied research and streamlining mandatory reporting). In addition to being central to what we do, our decision support software tends to be the “wow” factor that first engages potential agency partners and gets them curious to participate and support some of our other important but less flashy work.

• Commercial Business Classification:
  We have an ongoing applied research project to develop a pipeline for classifying customers into specific business classifications given only an address. Our aim is to make use of multiple data sources (e.g. Yelp, Google Places, other business databases) to predict a classification for a customer. This is a very difficult project and progress so far as been stop and go. Our ideal end result would resemble a python library that takes f(address) -> classification but this is complicated by factors like strip malls (many businesses served by a single water meter) and generally poor data quality. Our hope is that by fusing multiple data sources we can arrive at something useful for our water agency partners. This project is more experimental and open-ended, and making progress here would be a substantial advance for some specific problems in the water sector.

Core Skills Needed

• Project 1: Web Development, Web mapping, Javascript/Vue, Web Design, Python Flask
• Project 2: Python, Data Engineering, Entity Resolution, Data fusion
• General mentorship skills: UI/UX Design, Product Management

Current Tech Stack

• Python
• Flask
• Postgres
• AWS
• RShiny

Project contact Christopher Tull, Project Manager

MapSwipe.org

Mankind is no stranger to natural disasters and disease outbreak. And be it places in Vietnam, Tanzania, Myanmar or Belize, often, no maps means delayed response and uneven allocation of resources.

To bridge this gap, and to make relief and rehabilitation operations more effective, a group of humanitarian organizations, including the American Red Cross, British Red Cross, Médecins Sans Frontières and the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (HOT) founded the Missing Maps Project enduring the summer of 2014. The initiative was designed to help remote communities better prepare for emergencies. By mapping out the locations of buildings, houses and roads and points of interest like health facilities and schools in vulnerable areas/communities, the project identifies potential hazards and possible evacuation routes, which ultimately strengthens locals in the event of a disaster.

MapSwipe is a mobile app that lets you put the world's most vulnerable people on the map. Users swipe through satellite images of a region, tapping the screen when they see features they’re looking for including settlements, roads and rivers. Now, members of the public can directly contribute.

Mobile App - v2.0 is in the dev branch here.
Backend - v2.0 is in the dev branch here.

Core Challenge

25,000 volunteers strong, with over 1,500 monthly active users, the MapSwipe project has helped NGOs map over 600,000 km^2. It was time to build MapSwipe v2.0, opening new use-cases and leveraging new technologies, including AI. Eg. “Validating machine prediction of building locations”. Now we need help to prep for a release in early Septembre.

Current Tech Stack

The architecture of the app is quite simple, with a React-Native App and a Python backend leveraging Postgres and Firebase.

React Native Development

Description

The app is being developed in React Native. Before release, the team would love to have experienced React Native developers join in and help improve the app. There are tons of opportunities to make things better and make a difference!

Skills

• React Native and Mobile experience.
• Experience with versioning and deploys is a plus.

Timeline

We hope to release the app early September, so this is the last sprint before release! Of course we will continue to improve the app over time, but any help we can now will be incredibly useful.

UX Improvements

Description

While developing v2, our main focus has been on integrating new important features, and making the app more useful for machine-learning applications. We know that the UX and design of the app can be much better and attract more users. If this is what you do, reach out!

Skills

• UX & UI experience for mobile

Timeline

We hope to release the app early September, so this is the last sprint before release! Of course we will continue to improve the app over time, but any help we can now will be incredibly useful.

Next Steps

Do you like this organization and its project(s)? Send us an email at [email protected] with relevant info about yourself! We will then reach out and introduce you to the right persons.

Are you looking for more inspiration? Visit Explore by Ovio or checkout other opportunities here.

Open Food Facts

Open Food Facts is a Wikipedia for food products: a free, open and collaborative database of more than 750,000 food products from around the world. 1 million active users every month use our mobile apps or web site to make better food choices for their health and the environment. Our database is published as open data and is reused by more than 100 other applications and researchers.

Core Challenge

We need help to improve the Open Food Facts mobile applications for iOS and Android that are used to both collect data about products and help people make better food choices for their health and for the planet.
Our products database is rapidly expanding, and we have an increasing data gap: we have hundreds of thousands of products with photos of ingredients, nutrition facts etc. but this data has not been extracted. We are building models to extract it automatically through machine learning and computer vision algorithms.

Current Tech Stack

• Java
• Javascript
• UI, UX

Next Steps

Github repo

Do you like this organization and its project(s)? Send us an email at [email protected] with relevant info about yourself! We will then reach out and introduce you to the right persons.

Are you looking for more inspiration? Visit Explore by Ovio or checkout other opportunities here.

At Connect Our Kids, our mission is to connect every foster kid in the US with their permanent loving home. We're scaling up a proven technique called "family searching" - which focuses on discovering and engaging extended family members to aid foster kids. Our technology will help social workers quickly and accurately build family trees.

Core Challenge

We need to build a very simple web application that helps social workers search for contact information for extended family members. The tool will help thousands of social workers do a task they are already doing - finding permanent loving homes for foster kids.

Projects

People Search platform: Build a Connect Our Kids branded “people search” tool that will provide social workers quick access to one or more sources of people contact information. This tool will be a very simple web browser only application that uses existing backend APIs. The tool will allow users from specific domains to sign-up, and then perform searches of contact information for people. The application will keep logs (excluding actual searches and content), and provide basic help for the end user. Thousands of social workers will use this tool to perform searches for contact information of extended family for foster kids. Each search represents one step closer to finding a permanent loving home for a foster kid.

Impact

Thousands of social workers will use this tool to perform searches for contact information of extended family for foster kids. Each search represents one step closer to finding a permanent loving home for a foster kid.

Core Skills Needed

• Angular 7
• REST APIs
• UI/UX Design

Current Tech Stack

• Angular 7, NodeJS
• Auth0
• AWS EC2 and Serverless
• S3

What to expect?

You will work with a small volunteer team of 2-3 experts in UI, frontend, and REST API clients. You’ll collaborate on design ideas, write code and review others’ code. You’ll learn about the US foster care system and how technology can have a huge positive impact. We are an all-volunteer team committed to providing solutions for social workers. And we need skilled people like you to join us. Accomplishing this mission will mean a dramatically improved life for thousands of vulnerable kids right here in the US.

Project contact Travis Collins, CTO

Oppia

At Oppia, we believe that all students deserve a high-quality and effective education. Our mission is to provide high-quality education to those who lack access to it, with a focus on underserved and disadvantaged communities. We do this by working as a community to create lessons and distribute them to students who need them, in partnership with NGOs around the world. Oppia's lessons have been used by over 1 million users, and recent trials with low-income students in India have shown that students in these communities find the lessons useful, enjoyable and effective.

Core Challenge

How can we build a sustainable infrastructure that enables the community to collaborate effectively in order to produce high-quality learning experiences that are available to all students, and that result in demonstrable learning improvements? This is the problem that Oppia sets out to solve -- as a small volunteer-based tech nonprofit, we rely heavily on platform infrastructure and tooling to reduce the amount of manual work involved in lesson creation, so that we can involve more people in the community and spend more time focusing on improving the quality of the education we provide.

Current Tech Stack

Oppia is written using Python and AngularJS, and is built on top of App Engine.
More information here

Project 1 - Audio Translation

Description

The aim of the Audio Translations project is to build the infrastructure that enables members of the community to create subtitles and voiceovers for lessons in other languages. This is important because many students do not speak English fluently, so language competency is a significant barrier to entry for them when accessing online educational material.

Skills

Full-stack development; technical design

Impact

As a result of this project, lessons will become translatable into multiple languages, in both written and audio form. This will make the lessons accessible to students who do not speak English as a first language so that they can benefit from the interactive teaching that Oppia provides, whilst still keeping the lessons easy to maintain. Trials in India and Cameroon have shown that providing voiceovers in students’ native languages helps them significantly in understanding the lessons.

Project 2 - Practice session interface

Description

The aim of the Practice Sessions project is to build on Oppia’s existing skill infrastructure to create a “practice session” interface that enables students to practice the skills they have learned.

Skills

Full-stack development; technical design

Impact

We have found, from observations during a randomized trial, that students often need additional practice after encountering a skill in order to master it fully. Making “practice sessions” easily available to students will allow them to develop this mastery by practicing skills they have learned, and the immediate feedback and hints that they get will help them learn these skills faster (especially in local environments where no one would otherwise be checking their work or giving feedback on it).

Project 3 - Angular 2 migration

Description

The Angular 2 migration project aims to migrate the frontend of the Oppia codebase from AngularJS (which is now deprecated) to Angular 2 (and, later, to the most current version of Angular), in order to avoid breakage in the future.

Skills

Frontend development; familiarity with AngularJS/Angular 2; attention to detail.

Impact

As AngularJS becomes more of a “legacy” framework, we are finding it harder to bring in new contributors, who are typically familiar with more modern versions of Angular. Upgrading will also allow the codebase to support type-checking, improve performance, and ensure that security and other improvements to the library can be integrated into Oppia.

Project 4 - Creation experience

Description

The aim of the “creation experience” project is to improve the lesson creation experience for Oppia contributors and make it more bite-sized and distributable so that many people can help improve a lesson based on their abilities and interests. Current sub-goals of the project include working on an art contribution pipeline and fixing bugs in the exploration editor.

Skills

Full-stack development; technical design.

Impact

Making it easier for creators to collaborate on building lessons would reduce the burden that needs to be taken on by individual creators, and enable each contributor to help according to their strengths. In the long-term, we expect this to result in an open library of higher-quality lessons on a larger number of topics.

Project 5 - Bugfix

Description

The aim of the bugfixing team is to fix all user-facing bugs that are currently in the backlog (we have around 23 throughout the site). These bugs often affect the user experiences for learners and creators. Often, the fixes aren’t very large, but because of resource constraints, we have not had time to look into them. This would be a good project for newer contributors.

Skills

Debugging ability; frontend/backend development.

Impact

Fixing core bugs in the learner and creator experiences will make it easier and more intuitive for them to use Oppia, both for learning things, and also creating new lessons.

Project 6 - Learner Experience

Description

The aim of the Learner Experience project is to provide an intuitive experience for students, especially those who are new to using the Web for learning. The team is currently working on a redesign of the library page to split it into a “curated” and a “community” section, so that learners’ first experience with the site is with curated lessons that are really high-quality and that the community has put a lot of effort into. The team is also working on new topic pages that support skill review, practice sessions, and multiple stories that demonstrate how the skills are being applied in practice. In general, we would be open to any ideas that would help learners to learn more effectively, especially those from underserved communities.

Skills

Full-stack development (with an emphasis on the frontend). UI/UX design experience is appreciated (but not required).

Impact

Crafting a learner experience that is universally intuitive and enjoyable, even for students who have never used a computer before, is key to making Oppia lessons accessible to every student around the world. We have seen, in user studies, how small-seeming UI issues can completely derail a student’s learning experience, and we want to take steps to actively prevent that from happening.

Project 7

Description

The Developer Experience project is aimed at ensuring that all Oppia technical contributors, especially those who are contributing to open source for the first time, have a smooth and enjoyable experience working on Oppia. This involves ensuring that the testing frameworks are robust, that there are sufficient automated checks, that it is easy to setup Oppia in various environments, and that there are mechanisms to ensure that PRs are reviewed and queries are answered in a timely way.

Skills

Backend development (Python)

Impact

The work that you do on this project will not only help the Oppia developer team run smoothly, but will enable new contributors to get started quickly with the project. Many of Oppia’s technical contributors are students from various universities who have never contributed to an open source project before, and we aspire to be a welcoming environment for these students; ensuring that the development process works smoothly is an important part of this.

Project 8 - Lesson Analytics

Description

The Lesson Analytics project aims to provide creators with tools that help them detect and diagnose issues in their lessons so that they can improve them to better meet the needs of future students. This involves implementing detecting mechanisms for common issues and surfacing them to creators in a way that they can easily take action on. The project also aims to help creators understand how good their lessons are at engaging students and delivering effective education so that they can see the impact of their work.

Skills

Frontend development (AngularJS/Angular)

Impact

Incremental improvements are a very important part of the Oppia lesson creation process, since they allow creators to spend their time fixing the issues that matter most. This is one reason we expect Oppia lessons to be very effective -- after a certain point, it becomes clear what the most common misconceptions students are having are, and the lessons can then be easily extended to catch those. Making the feedback loop as tight as possible would help the lessons reach this state faster and be maximally useful to students in perpetuity.

Project 9 - Speed efficiency

Description

The Speed project aims to lower Oppia's latency as much as possible (both backend and frontend), so that all pages load fast and are bandwidth-efficient.

Skills

Performance optimization

####Impact
Many of Oppia’s learners are located in areas where Internet access is costly. This is why our lessons don’t use videos -- they require more bandwidth than students can afford. As a corollary, we need to ensure that our lesson pages load very quickly and use minimal bandwidth so that they do not use up a lot of a student’s data connection.

Project 10 - Android App development

Description

The aim of the Android app project is to build a version of Oppia that can be used offline as an Android app. This is because cheaper Android phones are increasingly available to the demographic we are trying to reach, but Internet connection is still scarce, especially in rural areas. We envision a solution where a small number of phones containing lessons that are playable offline could be shared between many students in a rural village in order to provide effective education where it is lacking.

Skills

Android development

Impact

Creating an offline version of Oppia would help make the Oppia lessons universally accessible by allowing them to be played by students without Internet access. This is a large demographic that mostly includes rural and underserved areas, and the students in those areas are the very ones we want to reach.

What to expect?

• Before joining a subproject, volunteers will work on a couple of starter projects to become familiar with the development workflow.
• Volunteers will be working with teams to complete each subproject.
• Volunteers should be committed and should keep their commitments -- so please make sure that you have time to volunteer with us. We are committed to our volunteers and will spend as much time as needed to ensure that they have a great experience.
• Volunteers should be available for regular check-ins with the Oppia team (at a mutually convenient time and cadence to be determined).
• Volunteers are strongly encouraged to reach out to the Oppia team if they need any support between the regular check-ins. Communication is key!

Next Steps

Do you like this organization and its project(s)? Send us an email at [email protected] with relevant info about yourself! We will then reach out and introduce you to the right persons.

Are you looking for more inspiration? Visit Explore by Ovio or checkout other opportunities here.

OUTWORDS

OUTWORDS is the first national effort to capture the stories of LGBTQ pioneers and elders all over America. We’ve just published our first volume of interviews, THE BOOK OF PRIDE, and we’ve launched this platform to make our stories freely available for research, information, and inspiration.

Core Challenge

The Outwords Archive has developed a platform to showcase and inspire with stories from LGBTQ+ pioneers across America. It is absolutely central to fulfilling our mission. Built in PHP, the platform requires improvements to offer a smooth experience for our users.

Current Tech Stack

• PHP webapp

Proposed Tasks

• Determine why home-page videos on theoutwordsarchive.org are loading slowly (I think this has to do with the fact that the full videos are loading, instead of a placeholder cover image…I believe this is a relatively easy fix — and we can provide cover images for each video if necessary)
• Evaluate the images in the carousel and suggest design improvements
• Suggest overall design enhancements to make the UI/UX more user-friendly

Skills

• Frontend
• PHP

Impact

Describe the impact this project will have on your organization. Why is it important?

Next Steps

Do you like this organization and its project(s)? Send us an email at [email protected] with relevant info about yourself! We will then reach out and introduce you to the right persons.

Are you looking for more inspiration? Visit Explore by Ovio or check out other opportunities here.

slavefreetrade

Eliminating modern slavery in supply chains through assessing and monitoring human rights in workplaces globally in real-time - by asking every single person in a workplace. We feature a new public-facing social label for organizations and products able to achieve and maintain ratings. And building APIs for data to be used for sustainable procurement, ethical consumption, ESG investing, and evidence-based risk assessment.

--> Learn more here
--> Github

Core Challenge

We are in pilot with 3 projects. 7 more projects in the queue. We are held back by tech development (coding) and a systems engineer to pull it all together. We are all volunteers until the MVP earns revenue for the NGO. So we lack sufficient skills database expertise, systems engineering, cloud engineering, mobile app development, data analytics and visualization, and web development.

Current Tech Stack

• NoSQL, SQL
• Python
• Tableau
• QuestionPro
• Azure Cloud

SubProject: New database and data models

Description

We need help transferring from our current infrastructure in NoSQL into something scalable. We don't really know where to start or what technology to use.

Skills

• Technical design
• Backend

Impact

The platform is the core; it enables us to automate and scale the collection of human source data on workplace conditions in real-time, all the time. And then distribute that to the right audiences and decision-makers.

Timeline

ASAP

Next Steps

Do you like this organization and its project(s)? Send us an email at [email protected] with relevant info about yourself! We will then reach out and introduce you to the right persons.

Are you looking for more inspiration? Visit Explore by Ovio or checkout other opportunities here.

Tech nonprofit based in Berkeley, CA. Replate matches extra food with communities in need. Their platform enables charities and hungry individuals to recover food donations based on their needs and location.

Core Challenge

Even if a small tech nonprofit can put together a performant web-platform, supporting it in production over months and years requires knowledge, experience, and hard work. How can we help the tech nonprofit Replate build the infrastructure, systems, and processes they need to support a mission-critical platform for the long run?

Projects

• Efficiency Audit The main platform is built using Ruby on Rails and React, and is supported by a single engineering lead. Replate would love a senior-level engineer or highly technical engineering manager to mentor our lead engineer during our hyper growth period, and help auditing our code. This would include working closely with our engineer to review code, spec projects, and advise on building a scalable architecture.
• Data Flow We would like to better leverage the information created through our application and improve monitoring. By doing so, we believe that we can improve our infrastructure, our efficiency, and deliver more food.
• Food Recovery App We are building a mobile app to complement our web-platform and hope to release it in March 2018. Advice and guidance from React-Native experts would be super useful to help us deliver the best experience possible to our users.
• Recipients Portal In a sense, we are a B2B company, we get food from corporate clients and deliver it to organizations and shelters. We would like to develop a portal to better engage with our recipients, better understand how much food is delivered and keep improving their experience.

Core Skills Needed

Ruby on Rails, React, Heroku, AWS, Sentry, React Native, Technical Project Management, experience working with systems in real-world production environments.

Current Tech Stack

• React front end, Ruby on Rails backend, Heroku deploy
• Sentry

Project contact Maen Mahfoud, Replate Founder.

Get In Touch!

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Ready to contribute or interested in learning more?
Give us a call or send us an email and we will get back to you as soon as possible!