Greetings Sudo Web Craftians,

tldr: opportunity to make/finish a web-app for volunteer Doulas, doing social good and making a small amount of cash at the same time.

I have been working with Spiral Doulas, an organization that mostly provides abortion support to low-income individuals in Minneapolis, to create a web-app that would manage their client interactions. Abortion doula organizations have very special privacy needs for their clients, and yet have no off the shelf technology at all to support them. The system must match clients and doulas anonymously until both parties accept the match, then swap contact information, and track results. In the spring, working closely with organizers we created a UI prototype which you can play with at http://doula.cs.umn.edu/client.html. The Spiral saw so much potential in the prototype that they asked if we could complete it this summer - which the old team can't. Would you like to help?

The goal is to polish the front-end, which is half-complete, and implement the backend. We spent a lot of time prototyping the UX and running it through user testing, so we know we have something useful on our hands. In fact there are many volunteer doula organizations that have identical needs, so there might be many instances of this system rolled out.

Which technologies to use? At the moment we have just written some javascript and css (all open source). As for the backend we were planning to use mysql and django, but don't consider the backend technology to be a deal breaker, you could make your choice. The old team would be glad to jump back in and help with development and support starting in the fall.

The compensation right now is not finalized. Spiral have indicated that they have some money for summer development. This a small team with non-profit funding of only a few thousand dollars per year, so calibrate expectations accordingly. You'll also receive the satisfaction of writing a program that people will actually use, and use to make a positive change in the world.


Email me max@notconfusing.com to find out more.


Make a great day,
Max Klein ‽ http://notconfusing.com/