While I look for a job, I'd like to do something useful with my time. I have a feeling there must be schools or charities or other worthy organisations that could use some of my time, but I've no idea how to go about finding them. Is there a marketplace for this kind of thing? I live in the UK.
+12
A:
You could contribute to an open source project for instance. There are plenty out there and there will certainly be projects in the language that you prefer.
Check some of the open source sites:
PS: as Dana points out in the comment, it will also help you build a nice resume. Plus, not only will it help strengthen your skills, you will get to know lots of talented people that you can learn from.
Christophe Herreman
2009-02-27 10:32:22
This will help build your resume, too.
Dana Robinson
2009-02-27 10:34:40
+6
A:
I think your best bet would be to find a handful of charities that do things you believe are worthwhile and then contact them directly, providing a CV. They can then farm it out to whatever technology team they have.
Same goes for local schools, shelters etc.
GaryF
2009-02-27 10:32:37
+1
A:
Try stepping into the nearest university and ask for the IT department. Not only will they (most likely) have some work, the work should also be useful and quite clearly specsed. Charity and other organizations might have lots of wishes, but can they express what they really want?
tehvan
2009-02-27 10:35:38
+1
A:
I shall keep an eye on this question. Hopefully there will be updates. I once tried to give away time to do website maintenance or IT Support or similar and found it almost impossible. Charities seem quite happy to take £2 a month but offer them a contractor who should be charging £500 a day and they don't know what to do with that.
This makes me wary of wasting my £2 a month.
I don't think there is necessarily a correlation between lack of technical know-how and effectiveness as a charity. If you do want to commit your time, find a *specific* need you can fulfill, an offer of random work is generally useless to such org's (they don't have the resources to administer it).
garrow
2009-02-27 12:59:57
If they have a terrible website and I offer to review their organisation process for maintaining it they must have some means of adminstering a website project. They have a website. Rationalising why they've left it to stagnate is not helpful.
2009-02-27 13:55:47
Agreed to an extent but I did get to speak to people at some of the organisations I approached who knew the situation and they admitted they once paid someone charity money for a pile of rubbish and then later had no way of fixing it. I offered, for their own reasons they declined...
2009-02-27 15:59:44
+3
A:
I found some relevant stuff here:
Also here:
http://www.thesite.org/workandstudy/volunteering/virtualvolunteering/search
I'll add any more sites into this answer if I find them.
Ben
2009-02-27 11:07:50
+1
A:
For me, while I was not having enough of load with my projects, I spent some time looking at some charity organization websites. Most of them sucked basicly in a worst manner. I then emailed some of them and asked if they would be interested in a website that could fit their needs more.
That was from a web applications developer point of view.
Generally, you can contribute a lot to many open source projects, just find what's interesting for you - so you have a lot of fun with it, and do something you could actually need. Missing your camera support in libgphoto? Check other's code, do what's working for you...
Missing a web application you think you could use? A system driver? I'm sure you find a lot of stuff you can just jump in, make work, and be happy with it.
kender
2009-02-27 12:52:37
+1
A:
Ben, I have no idea whether there is a 'market place' as such - so I can't answer your question as put.
But I think it is a great idea (so +1).
There are so many charities doing so many different things. I would ask myself what is it that I am really interested in - this will give me a smaller subset of charities to look at. For example, my own leanings are towards ecology and wildlife - so I would discard all the charities that are not involved in that area (I'm sure they are all worthy, but you need to limit the choices).
I would then try approaching some of those selected charities directly - some of them must be crying out for people like you to be able to help them.
Good luck!
Simon Knights
2009-02-27 13:19:04
+1
A:
You should try looking at universities - the university of hull in particular runs "seed software" which takes on people voluntarily and mostly does projects in the charity sector.
SLC
2010-04-16 07:17:15