Ask HN: How can I do social good through programming?
Say I want to apply what I know to better our chances as a species and/or as individuals. What problems do i work on?
Work hard, accumulate skills, and become better at your normal job. Even if you're not writing open source software to help local governments in third world countries have free elections and fight malaria or donating 50% of your salary, you're creating value and "bettering our species" just by doing something that someone is willing to pay you for. In fact, that's how most of the world's wealth is created.
Not saying you shouldn't volunteer or donate your salary (I personally try to donate a decent chunk of my salary to givedirectly) but -- unless you're a nigerian hacker or malware developer or something -- just because you're getting paid or working on something that isn't an absolute necessity doesn't mean you aren't doing social good. Just something to think about.
So in short: use judgement. There's a lot of social good to be done in mundane jobs - but just because someone is willing to pay for something, doesn't mean it should be done.
Now it is much more nuanced than that, network based criminal activity has existed since the invention of the telegraph, but I would be willing to wager even on a per capita basis of Windows, Mac, UNIX, and 'other' users of the network, it stands out.
That said, those days are largely behind us (caveat Wannacry and poor update policies) and I consider properly patched operating systems from all of the major vendors to be credibly defended from exploitation. I reason to that point of view by using the price offered for 'zero days' as an indicator of the challenge of finding them.
which ones? forcing them or not forcing them?
1. Bundling them -- it should be trivial to turn off all non-security updates while still getting all security updates.
Counterpoint: There might be no unambiguous distinction between security update or non-security update.
2. Not having them. WannaCry was so bad because Microsoft stopped providing security updates for a system that's still widely used.
Counterpoint: It seems odd to insist Microsoft continue to provide updates to a fifteen-year-old system they end-of-lifed three years ago. Should we be able to force them to keep providing updates indefinitely by steadfastly refusing to upgrade?
It's really the IBM PC platform, IBM's willingness to sign a non-exclusive contract for the OS, and the success of the early clones (Compaq, AST, etc) making DOS so common that raised productivity so much. Whatever OS had shipped on them would have grabbed the market share DOS and Windows did.
By killing Netscape he set back the computer industry by a decade or more. If Gates hadn't used anti-competitive tactics, and he had just accepted, say, a 60% share for Windows, we would have reached where we are much quicker.
We benefit immensely from the presence today of multiple strong operating systems, Windows, Android, iOS, MacOS, Linux, and Chrome are all great offerings that force the other players to be better.
Windows languished during its monopoly decade, and we were all stuck with it. Why did it even take until iPhone 3G for there to be a widespread online software store? Because Microsoft profited from Office being the biggest, most profitable box on a shelf with a bunch of other boxes, and having that boxed software be the only place you could direct your attention on a PC. Steve Jobs could start an online software store because Apple was barely selling any software. They had nothing to lose. Gates had the world to lose.
Look at where peoples' attention goes today. That's what Netscape was promising. Now imagine if Gates had let that happen in 1995.
And Word and Excel were clones of existing software. Microsoft had about as much positive impact on the tech industry as Baidu is having now. Baidu probably has more users than Gates ever had.
2. I'm sure Microsoft's competitive tactics had something to do with it, but it also sounds like Netscape had it's own problems: https://www.quora.com/Why-did-Netscape-lose-ground-to-IE
It's comforting to think that just going to work and doing your job is actually contributing to something, but I just don't see how that can be generally true and definitely not universally true.
Even if we just measured contribution in purely capitalist terms, e.g. shareholder value, I don't think your claim is true. I think there have been several studies showing that the average company destroys shareholder value on net. It's likely that a lot of employees in such companies are also destroying shareholder value. And this is just shareholder value - to say nothing of the value destroyed for other stakeholders.
Yes, it is possible to lead your life in such a way that even if you work very hard, you're still a net drain on humanity.
Sorry, but we have to think much harder about how we can create a net positive contribution.
We need to go beyond high school guidance counselor nostrums like "work hard! study hard!" and really struggle with the issue of how we can contribute.
I think your argument is just as reductive as the parent comment. If we're going to come up with a definition of 'value' that actually helps people make good decisions about how to spend their time, then its too simplistic to say 'all jobs create some value', but it's also too simplistic to say 'the average job is destroying value'.
I honestly think the reason most people don't try to do more good in the world is because it's just really hard and complicated to tell what's good/valuable and what's not.
I can't imagine how it would NOT be true. Say you buy something from the store. Presumably you're getting more value from it than it costs, if you weren't, you wouldn't buy it. Same with a company. If an employee provides more value than their salary, it makes sense to hire them. Otherwise it doesn't. Sure it's not perfect and wages are sticky and people skate by etc, but you have to be pretty cynical to think most people aren't providing net value at their jobs. Maybe we have a different definition of "contributing to something."
Also:
"...there have been several studies showing that the average company destroys shareholder value on net."
Maybe I'm misunderstanding something or this is a typo, but how could this be true? Shareholder value isn't an abstract concept like love or blue, it's the number of shares in a co*their price. The SP 500 is not negative.
You can make money while damaging society. Some (possible) examples are employees working at: - a tobacco company - company that supplies oppressive regimes with tools (software and military hardware) to stay in power - company peddling some kind false medical treatment - tax lawyer helping people find loopholes - lobbyist working to increase regulatory capture in favor of their company
> you have to be pretty cynical to think most people aren't providing net value at their jobs
Yes, I agree. But note that you can provide net value to your company, but detract from society as a whole. Even so, I'd say the majority of people are adding value to society: plumbers, mechanics, pilots, engineers, most lawyers, some politicians, etc.
But there is a spectrum of how much you contribute ranging from way in the negative to way in the positive. There's also jobs that contribute nothing, but don't really hurt. Day Traders come to mind, they do high-frequency money sloshing, but don't really change anything.
It is easy to build something and say "this helped family X, or this powered Y homes", but there are so many externalities that are simply hidden. What if family X is part of Nation Z, who is about to start thermonuclear war W?
It's just a guessing game at that point. It seems that most people ignore it under the guise of "well, I do the good that I can", but it's false comfort, IMO.
It's better than the alternative, which is to assume that any job that pays (and thus is from a company that earns profit) has equal impact or externalities with all other companies.
A lack of clarity shouldn't be an excuse for not trying.
I agree with the rest of your comment, except for the above quote. The jobs you listed do not make up the majority. It's interesting that you only list trades and educated workers who earn above-average wages. A plumber can earn in one day of overcharged labour what it takes a worker in the service industry a week or longer. Pilots, engineers, lawyers, and politicians certainly do not belong as part of any definition of "majority".
The majority of jobs are in the service industry: fast food joints, real restaurants, retailers, etc. More than half of service industry jobs could vanish overnight, and consumers would get along just fine. These companies and jobs don't exist out of a necessity to serve society; they exist only because employees can be paid a tiny percentage of what they are worth (and in some cases being forced to live off food stamps), while the corporations rake in billions. These companies aim to make the easiest dollar possible, with no effort put into providing a service anyone actually needs. A job does not benefit society simply because a company manages to sustain itself by maximizing its own profits at the cost of taking advantage of employees.
If we could shut down every fast food joint (ex: McDonald's) and bottom-feeding retailers (ex: Walmart), and find positions for all those employees doing something more beneficial to society, that alone would make a huge difference. Those two companies are the tip of an enormous iceberg. These companies are not a "necessary evil", as if without them there would be no jobs. These corporations perpetuate the status quo to benefit themselves - society is an externality.
The capitalism we practice today will never improve upon this situation. The only incentive is for corporations to take the entire cake, offering services people think they want (they don't even really want them), rather than services people need. Things will never change without a major shift in the way we view economics. Perhaps if the next major plague takes out 50% of the population, we'll be forced to return to basics.
However: In that very same perfect system, the individual is also compensated for exactly 100% of the added value.
If they then spend it on personal consumption, they capture all the value of their work for personal benefit.
Society is improved by that exact amount only if you include that workers well-being in the calculation. Otherwise, it's exactly zero.
But the effective altruist community has already come up with a perfectly valid yet somewhat disappointing answer: "earn to give", i. e. try to make as much money as possible, then spend as much of it as possible on others' wellbeing.
But as it grows revenue, shifting resources to protecting its revenue stream starts to become lucrative. Employees spend some of their time providing value to customers, and some of their time protecting the "moat" around the company.
The percentage varies quite a lot, but I think there are lots of places where it's quite high. And within a company you may be acting in a role that's almost 100% moat protection, even if your coworkers are providing value directly. Without you, other people at other companies would provide that value directly, you're just helping to ensure that it happens under your shareholders' brand.
It goes meta, because then you have companies whose product is just moat protection services for other companies.
And it goes meta in the other direction too, down to the individual employee level. When you have no experience, you devote 100% of your energy to providing value. Once you have credibility amongst your coworkers, it makes sense to start shifting some of your resources to maintaining that credibility. This can become pathological in the same way, with entire companies whose product helps employees at other companies appear more credible to their peers. E.g. PowerPoint.
I have a lot of nice blue chip stocks that don't do that. Companies that not only pay me dividends far greater than any savings account, but the base value of the stock increases as well. None of these companies are tech or speculative stocks. They are solid big corporations manufacturing real things that people buy to live. Maybe it's essential. Maybe it's artificial cheese and soda pop. But it's something regular people buy at the corner store or the equivalent. And there's lots of them. And this activity is essential in some way for them and nothing about the transaction is misrepresented or unreasonable.
On the second point: this could happen a variety of way. For example, shareholder value is destroyed when there are positive returns, but those returns are worse than what could be realized from equivalently risky positions. Another way of thinking about this is that the return on capital is less than the cost of capital, resulting in a net negative return. Another way this could happen is if shareholder returns follow a power law where only a handful of companies (e.g. Amazon) create outsized positive risk-adjusted returns whereas most companies generate negative returns or positive returns at an unnecessarily high risk level.
So, yeah, just because someone pays you doesn't imply you're actually doing something worthwhile.
This is kind of personal for me because I spent way too many years under the mistaken belief that just because I was getting paid I was doing something worthwhile. I would hope others avoid the mistake I made.
Creating wealth vs transferring wealth.
I've tried to choose jobs that have some value add, some win/win angle. Alas, it hasn't been that easy.
Nevermind that by merely participating in a marketplace as a service provider or consumer you're providing a social benefit; that benefit's just not as easy to understand and doesn't get you any vanity points.
But if you're on a mission trip carrying a third world orphan in a microloan-built vaccination tent while on the phone with companies asking for food donations, you're just the most selfless person ever - clearly such charity is just an innate part of who you are.
Also, spending time on understanding the benefits coming from participation in a marketplace leads one to conclude that the market doesn't address all human needs promptly enough, and is not itself beyond creating many great problems.
Feel free to e-mail me if you ever want to talk about this further (address in profile).
Now, this form of condolence contains an entire theory, which it will be well to show up in this simple case, seeing that it is precisely the same as that which, unhappily, regulates the greater part of our economical institutions.
Suppose it cost six francs to repair the damage, and you say that the accident brings six francs to the glazier's trade – that it encourages that trade to the amount of six francs – I grant it; I have not a word to say against it; you reason justly. The glazier comes, performs his task, receives his six francs, rubs his hands, and, in his heart, blesses the careless child. All this is that which is seen.
But if, on the other hand, you come to the conclusion, as is too often the case, that it is a good thing to break windows, that it causes money to circulate, and that the encouragement of industry in general will be the result of it, you will oblige me to call out, "Stop there! Your theory is confined to that which is seen; it takes no account of that which is not seen."
It is not seen that as our shopkeeper has spent six francs upon one thing, he cannot spend them upon another. It is not seen that if he had not had a window to replace, he would, perhaps, have replaced his old shoes, or added another book to his library. In short, he would have employed his six francs in some way, which this accident has prevented. [0]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window
In fact, by working for a typical VC-fueled tech company, you're probably helping a few very rich people extract rent more efficiently from a greater number of people. Your best bet for social impact is to do the exact opposite -- get involved in left politics, find ways to show solidarity with people who are being hurt by the Uber-ization and Airbnb-ization of the world, and use your tech skills to counter those effects.
> you're creating value and "bettering our species" just by doing something that someone is willing to pay you for
^^^ The thought process that lets HNers sleep at night.
Smith was a very thoughtful economist but people have a bad habit of cherry-picking his work to suit their own needs while ignoring the bits that would constrain them.
If I earn a good salary but I buy nothing but fast food or the cheapest (factory farmed) meat, cheap clothes made in sweatshops, expensive gadgets from companies that exploit workers, own 3 gas guzzling cars, have 5 children, vote for politicians who enjoy waging war on on other countries, how am I making the world better?
Yes, if you're creating better entertainment, but furniture, better toys, better gadgets, and people are willing to pay for them, you have made the world better.
But people are also willing to pay for weapons, for software that helps them to violate the privacy of others, for financial products that promise much and deliver little, for products that have addictive properties from sugar to gambling to everything else.
So, yes, just building things that other people want and getting rich in the process CAN be a good thing to do. But it is not AUTOMATICALLY a good thing to do.
So I would be very surprised if compensation is directly tied to societal value.
There are also organizations like Code for America that do open source work with local governments. Since those projects are open source, you could probably volunteer your time and contribute to those. Or simply volunteer in a non-developer capacity! :)
Doing actual social good -- helping people in ways that will actually solve their problems, understanding the consequences of changing their lives -- requires a ton of context and communication. I think it's very, very difficult to do so without either dedicating most of your time to that cause, or working closely with an organization that is already doing so. (E.g., volunteering for a food bank is a lot more effective than just picking up food and distributing it on your own.)
Good conversations on both the Econtalk podcast [0] (which I know is an HN favorite) and the Long Now Foundation [1].
Procurement sounds absolutely awful at the federal level; she makes a compelling case for how needed modern software design and development processes are in providing effective and cost efficient government services.
[0]http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2017/05/jennifer_pahlka.htm... [1]http://longnow.org/seminars/02017/feb/01/fixing-government-b...
It helps to actually be passionate about the field.
I’ll second the reference to Code for America. I have a colleague who did their fellowship and learned a ton while working with some great local governmental agencies. They’ve also recently launched a job board to curate high impact mission-driven jobs and jobs with local government entities: https://jobs.codeforamerica.org/.
I’d also encourage looking at B-Corps: https://www.bcorporation.net/. These are for-profit companies that include positive social impact alongside profit as determinants of success. I work at TechChange, which is a B-Corp. If education and capacity development are your passions, we at TechChange are building a SaaS learning platform that empowers organizations around the world to make their training more effective. We are working hard to push the limits of traditional online learning and are looking for talented folks to help us achieve this goal: https://www.techchange.org/careers/.
My team works on radically improving access to the food stamp program, a massive anti-poverty program, but one with only about 65% of eligible Californians enrolled — we've found a lot of that gap is because the process is really difficult.
If you apply in California, this is the online experience — 200+ questions, 50+ screens, a lot of confusion: http://citizenonboard.com/snap/ca/#2
So we operate a much easier online application which is mobile-first (~50% of search traffic for "food stamps") and which takes on average 8 minutes to complete — you can try it out at https://demo.getcalfresh.org/
And we're hiring:
- Senior Engineer (Ruby/Rails, TDD, pairing): https://www.codeforamerica.org/jobs?gh_jid=502640
- Product Manager: https://www.codeforamerica.org/jobs?gh_jid=652829
We also have a superb team working on safety and justice, namely with the goal of safely reducing incarceration. For example. They operate services that:
- Make it much easier for people to clear their records when the law allows (invaluable for re-entry and getting jobs)
- Allow case & probation workers to text with folks in the justice system and help them do the pre-trial diversion things that keep them out of jail/prison and help them with resources
They're also hiring for a Senior Engineer role: https://www.codeforamerica.org/jobs?gh_jid=525208
Happy to answer any questions about these!
Yes — San Francisco (SOMA) is the location for all of those.
A lot of why these processes are hard are not by intentional design, but rather by _unintentional, non-design_.
What do I mean? It's that these systems evolve over time, via massive waterfall IT procurement processes, and you often have someone (say, one county, or one unit) who proposes to add one more question because it makes it better for their unit or a subset of users.
Iterated over years and years — and with no systemic actor responsible for pushing back and saying, "but this creates more burden for the majority of users" — you get overwhelming user experiences. Sometimes I've jokingly called this the "no feature left behind" approach.
What we do is basically design & build a service that puts users at the center, and when someone wants us to add something ask ourselves, "will this help people quickly and easily get through the benefit enrollment process?"
It's essentially applying "products are about saying no," just to a domain where there's currently no one there to say no.
1. After the initial application, the next step is a phone interview where they're going to ask many of the same questions and verify information anyway. So what we do is focus on the 10-15 questions that make getting someone to that interview as quick and efficient on the gov't side as possible, as well as prepares the interviewer with the best information.
For example, there are complex rules around income and expenses (earned/unearned, self-employed, utilities, child care expenses) but we basically have found that the best situation is — since they'll be talking with someone who knows those rules extremely well — focus on the basics: who's in your household, do you qualify for expedited (emergency) service, etc.
2. Many of those ~200 questions really CONDITIONAL on some (eg, do you have a felony? do you have a felony for DRUGS?) —— but candidly many online gov't forms are just the digitization of paper forms (which obviously can't do conditional showing easily.)
3. We've found that there's a ton of low-hanging fruit. For example, we have an easy way for clients to take pictures of documents they need to submit from their phone (these days, these are often SUPER high quality, even on low-end devices.) We send those to counties via secure e-mail, which means it comes instantly. This has been so successful in one county that they're now using this document feature across ALL programs (health insurance, cash aid) and actually asking clients to send in documents WHILE they're on the phone with them, meaning they can hold for a second, check the email, see the pic, and issue the benefits immediately (rather than waiting for them to mail/fax/scan and upload after creating an account.)
Overall, we've found that despite that "intrinsic complexity," there's still a huge space for simplification just using what computers — and web sites — are good at.
We already have some State of CA jobs on there, but I'll pass along this link to the folks who run the gov't job board!
That is to say, provide email services that don't mine data for profit. Provide a social interaction space that doesn't attempt to manipulate moods, opinions, or sell its user's eyeballs. Provide an aggregation service with strong filtering tools in place of strong moderation. Provide a code repository with great tooling that doesn't include value judgements. Provide anonymous, secure communication between parties. Make mobile applications that provide wanted services without the in-app purchases, ads, or profiling.
The downside is that you're unlikely to get paid for it. You'll probably even lose money on it. In some cases, you'll even face legal pressure to stop or change.
There are plenty of companies 10x worse than Uber. Hivemind.
Are you really unfamiliar with how medallion owners used to treat their drivers?
That said, how are we really in a better place? Same problem, different master.
https://qz.com/563622/ubers-new-car-rental-program-for-drive...
That's much better advice than I'd expect from a sociology professor, if I'm to be honest.
I always thought that was interesting.
Either of those goals are good, but they're better done separately. See also: http://lesswrong.com/lw/6z/purchase_fuzzies_and_utilons_sepa....
The point of the article is that if you optimize for utilons, fuzzies and status points separately - e.g. by doing one thing for maximum utility, and then another for maximum fuzzies - you'll be more efficient in all of them than if you try to find one thing that maximizes all three at the same time.
Even if you're willing to take e.g. a 50% paycut to write code at a nonprofit, you're likely doing more good taking the obscenely high-paying industry job and donating that half of your salary, as unsexy as that is.
Which isn't to say there aren't meaningful social problems that technology can solve, but rather that the cost/reward curve is often suboptimal if you're optimizing for impact.
If you can take away the need for millions of dollars to run a campaign then policy makers aren't beholden to the few wealthy supporters that helped get them elected.
They help connect volunteers to projects that range from building an open-source voter database to an Uber-like app that helps the mobility-limited get transportation to vote. They are extremely transparent and always interested in growing the network. Many members of the network are engineers, product managers, or independent coders.
They list MoveOn as a key partner: https://github.com/ProgressiveCoders/functions/issues/196
This document clearly states the organisation is founded by Berine Sanders supporters: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1P8iL3kTWO0Y9aYe8lndcUWTJ...
And they built something called the "Resistance Calendar", containing events like: https://tockify.com/resistance.calendar/detail/384/149523120...
I mean for the most part it seems to be stuff I would support (personally), but to call it party neutral is at best true by way of technicality.
I doubt you find many Republican events on that calendar. Of course, I wouldn't expect to given the name of the group, but let's not play games and pretend it isn't partisan?
So it'll make an application that supports primarily republican causes too.
They have a bunch of interesting research, online articles, guides, and a book. The entire website is focused around how to make a difference with your career in a way that aligns with your own goals. It's a great resource.
1) https://cyclebath.org.uk/map/ This one has gone national and is up for a Creative Bath Innovation Award.
2) Using Census 2011 Data I've created a healthy cities and towns league index as well as spatial analysis on commuter behaviour. (6M people drive to work, of which 3.5M live within a 20 minute cycle ride) https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B4YARJgso6IxRjd1ZlNDZklGaX...
3) Worked with Bath Hacked and Strava to deliver a year of cycling in the city of Bath strava.bathhacked.org
4) Get involved in your local tech4good meetup.
Do not start from a "hey where can I use my skills for good?". Start with "I am passionate about X, what can I do to help X in anyway?"
Cheers for the insight!
Open source, modern software for charitable hospitals in the developing world.
Find some open source projects for some issue you care about. The medical community could use a lot of help, anything that automates some part of their job means medical staff is available to help more patients. There's a lot of room for automation in this field.
Personally I think anything in renewable energy, sexual education, and poverty alleviation are good highly effective causes to get behind as well.
Other than maybe e-mail, wikipedia is the best thing to come out of the internet. And its creator may not be a billionaire oligarch, but he has a GREAT life. If you can set aside a need to be filthy, needlessly, pointlessly rich, then maybe turn your next idea for a social network or a communication platform or whatever into a non-profit. It's amazing what types of products can be built for this world when you're building for the world, and not the shareholders.
How does one build and maintain a co-op? Could anyone recommend a book on the subject, that covers a variety of nations or regions?
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14135068
- https://electricembers.coop/pubs/TechCoopHOWTO.pdf
- Tech co-ops mailing list: https://npogroups.org/lists/info/tech-coop
I talked briefly with this co-op whose set up in Europe and seems to have members from all over, so they might provide good insight: https://camplight.net/
Also, talking to nonprofit founders, I've heard that starting a non-profit yourself can be pain in the ass. However, you can essentially outsource the management of the nonprofit to another nonprofit via 'fiscal sponsorship.' Web searching for that will bring up more details. For example, http://grayarea.org/incubator/fiscal-sponsorship/. I met the founder of this organization that started providing fiscal sponsorship recently as well: http://blog.hacker.fund/fs/
And finally, there are actually some co-ops that are trying to make this process easier. For example, this co-op alternative to kickstarter: https://snowdrift.coop/ and this co-op that makes software for making decisions within co-ops easier: https://www.loomio.org/
You should not make your business idea a not-for-profit out of the idea that this is somehow inherently morally superior. That is a bad reason to do so. Some types of work or goals are better served by a specific model. Some things are best served by having it done as a public good by the government, such as police and fire. Some things are well served by the not-for-profit model. Some things are well served by a for-profit model. Some things are well served by a co-op model. None of those is inherently morally better for all goals all the time.
These structures are not inherently moral as you said, but they do offer distinct incentive structures for their owners and employees. And there are plenty of ideas today that get called business ideas that could easily be better crafted outside of a corporation.
My first answer is to develop your skills to the point where you are strong on design and UI/UX, not just coding.
I say this because we've worked with some people who have this ability, and they're extremely effective as activists once they focus on a mission.
Aaron Swartz is one person who had this ability, but you don't have to be a genius polymath to be good at this, and Aaron wasn't amazing at visuals and design either. (He was good enough at it though, which was what mattered.)
Ideally, you should be able to speak persuasively online, using text, code and design creatively to get your message across. But as a minimum you should be able to build a prototype from your own vision, get the UI/UX to a point where you're happy with it by iterating, and QA it yourself.
There are a few reasons for this, but the main one is that most social change gets done by small groups of people, and many of those people aren't technical. And usually it leverages certain moments when people happen to be paying attention, and makes the most of those. So you won't have a big team, and being able to do most things yourself lets you respond quicker.
If you have that, I'd try your hand at working on some issues that interest you, either directly, or showing up at an org you admire and seeing if you can help.
We're setting up a space for volunteers, and also a YC-like fund for new activism projects that emphasizes the need for technical founders: http://fightforthefuture.org/ateams/
" OP here, actually floored by the rapidity and variety of responses. Thanks HN.
I'll take this opportunity to float an idea that's been kicking around in my head for a long time. The premise is to:
1) (this is almost certainly the easy part) build out a platform that is like a two-way khan academy - teacher and student, with at least the teacher having a tablet and a stylus that function well, sharing a digital blackboard, with a video chat optional -- where a student of something in a relatively privileged situation teaches a student of the same thing in a relatively less privileged situation -- where the sessions are stored and rewindable, both video and blackboard input.
2) the hard part; selling it as something to invest in and driving it to a point of having an endowment behind it, like Harvard's endowment, that allows the service to pay for moderation of student-teachers something like $12.00 USD an hour to teach, while subsidizing well-chosen students to have to pay something like $2 an hour to learn
it's been an idea for a passion project for a while "
Thanks!
My company, www.grove.co, strives to help families making it easy to buy sustainable products vs. conventional CPG. It seemed a bit crazy when we started, but now literally thousands of families get sustainable products from us every single day. It's hard to make a big impact on your own, but organizations and companies can do great things.
Shameless plug: we at https://www.patientsknowbest.com/careers.html are also hiring and are a B Corp -- our mission is to give patients control over their own medical data.
They organise different types of projects: DataDives, which are hackathon-type events and focus on data exploration and analysis; and DataCorps, longer term projects (a few months), where a team of volunteers will team up on a more project for the client charity.
They are looking for volunteers for a wide range of roles, including data scientists, programmers with experience with ML, dataviz experts, project managers, etc.
First, one of the best ways to do social good is to fight capitalism. Just by working at a worker co-op, you're doing this. Many tech co-ops are also built around resisting other oppressions like racism, patriarchy, etc.
Second, many co-ops (e.g. http://sassafras.coop, the one I work for) work on lots of social good projects.
You know, don't want to think you actually think that. Perhaps you meant, "fight the negative outcomes sometimes found in capitalist societies."
Inequality causes capitalism. Liberty allows inequality. Those "negative outcomes" come from inequality, not capitalism. Fighting capitalism is a workaround. It's an appealing workaround because the "underlying system" is centralized, and inequality is not.
The negative effects of inequality are free to do harm in a society with capitalism. That does not make capitalism the cause of those effects, it simply means that capitalism does nothing to prevent them.
Socialism does (claims to) do some things to fight inequality, but that does not mean I must prefer it to capitalism.
Inequality does not come from capitalism. Liberty allows inequality. Those "negative outcomes" come from inequality, not capitalism. Fighting capitalism (socialism) is a workaround. It's an appealing workaround because the "underlying system" is centralized, and inequality is not.
(Personally, I believe market economy has been much more beneficial to society in the past than it is now - simply because it's running out of "low hanging fruits", and the disconnect between its implicit values and what humans would generally like to see is growing.)
Generally speaking, you need a certain level of material security to worry about more abstract things like social good -- or even sexual pleasure. Lots of stuff I have read indicates that people in wealthy countries have a great deal more sex and talk and think about it a great deal more than those struggling to get something to eat. It is something of a luxury good. Ironically, the complaints about being a member of the lonely hearts club is generally an indication that you already have some baseline amount of your needs met well enough to bother to notice what you lack in that regard. People who are poor or oppressed enough typically spend all their time worrying about resolving whatever their largest problems are and spend much less time thinking about things like love, sex or romance.
Maslow's pyramid and all that.
You're 100% right about the hierarchy of needs (and about my baseline need satisfaction too; I can bitch about the state of the world exactly because I have somewhat stable income, health, safety and social sphere). I'm not disputing that. But since there are people who have those needs satisfied and are free to worry about more abstract things, is it wrong for them to ask how can they contribute so that more people reach that level of Maslow's pyramid (or, alternatively, so that the whole world won't go deeper into shit than it already is)?
So, perhaps we should just let this be as we seem to be talking at cross purposes.
A lot of these social good things need people to get involved, not software to be written.
Anything that helps feed people well or better, promotes germ control, reduces social friction in some way, helps marginalized peoples earn a living or helps people of limited means access basic decent housing promotes the social good. But those things are often not the heroics people have in mind when asking this type question.
There is a mountain of boring, yet critically important work waiting for people to just roll up their sleeves and pitch in.
I mean this is Y-Combinator after all, not exactly a hub of philanthropy.
We deal with this all the time. Well meaning techie comes along with a bunch of ideas, none of which are particularly compelling and all require a ton of work (on both sides). When we don't immediately do backflips, they disappear. Rinse, repeat.
edit:
Let me explain why donations like these are particularly valuable for orgs that survive on donations. Every bit of grant money comes with a huge amount of donor service attached to it, from the initial grant writing, to metric collection, to reporting and presentation - then the hassle of having to do it all again next year and hoping you still have the donor's attention. Of course all of these things take away from your core mission, and sooner or later you are wasting huge amounts of time doing fundraising and donor service.
If you find under resourced people doing effective work for a cause you believe in, a no strings attached gift at the right time can be a huge relief.
Y2K was supposed to be a global meltdown. There were people who prepped for that like a coming apocalypse. It was prevented and many people remember it as "Ha! Can you believe those fools ever believed we were in real danger?!"
No one gets up today and goes "Oh, thank god they fixed that and I am not living in the Y2K post apocalypse! My ATM still works and life goes on!"
I was molested for 2.5 years as a child in part because my mother stopped being a homemaker and began doing paid work outside the house. The direct cause and effect connection is extremely clear to me not only due to first hand experience but because of extensive reading on the topic. This is part of why I was a full time homemaker until my sons were 19 and 16. No one ever molested them. There was damn little opportunity for anyone to get them alone. I made sure of it.
I get straight up told I just got lucky and do not actually know shit all about preventing bad things from happening. When I try to share such information to help other people I basically get told "Shit happens. You can't stop it. Quit blaming the victims."
In my experience there are thousands of people doing the hard work day in and day out, quietly holding the line. It's a constant effort and constant tension, but for those who won't settle for anything less than revolution - that sort of work, no matter how vital, just isn't compelling enough. I personally find the prevalence of this kind of attitude very disturbing, although I suppose it is just human nature in the end - perhaps with a bit of celebrity/hero worship thrown in.
I also have a serious medical condition and have gotten off all drugs. I am routinely told I am crazy, making that up, it is a tall tale, my success is because my condition is mild, it is wild coincidence...etc etc...and I cannot possibly actually know anything useful. People who don't think I am straight up crazy and have acted on my suggestions have said things to me like "I fed my child like you suggested and they are in the ER less, but they aren't taking fewer drugs." What they mean is the child still needs the same maintenance drugs. They completely miss the fact that fewer ER visits means fewer antibiotics and other drugs, thus fewer ER visits means their child is taking fewer drugs.
Even people who have it clear in their mind that A prevented B have difficulty measuring the things that have not happened. They still mentally minimize the value of the accomplishment. It takes real and significant effort to try to quantify in a meaningful way that "We prevented X amount of catastrophe with our work." It is much easier to see lives saved by an ambulance than lives saved by the local gym or the local organic grocer.
Maybe something could be done to help / teach people to better quantify it (caveats about Goodhart's law notwithstanding)?
:-)
Here and elsewhere in the thread you make really good points about prevention and about non-obvious benefits of mundane things. That said, within the context of the topic, I can read your remarks in two ways:
1/ Helping society is much less obvious than it looks at first, so just drop the whole techie do-gooder savior attitude and get back to your job.
2/ Helping society is much less obvious than it looks at first, so please think about this space hard, and make sure to look at the unsexy, non-obvious places.
I'm not really sure which of the two you mean more, but I'll choose to read it as 2/.
I think the best social good comes from fostering a more civilized environment.
There are myriad ways to foster a more civilized environment. Pick whichever one fascinates you and go with that. Some people find snails endlessly fascinating. Others find computer security endlessly fascinating. Both interests have potential to be used to further the greater good.
Just because it is boring to you or me doesn't mean it will bore everyone. Sometimes it helps to have a larger perspective, like the story about the two brick layers. When asked what they are doing, one says "Building a wall." and the other says "Building a cathedral!" Both answers are equally valid, but I bet the second guy is a lot more jazzed to go to work in the morning.
Instead, we ended up with half a dozen prototypes of new projects solving problems no one had.
"Oh goody, a bunch of half-finished abandonware ..."
Said that, you can also think "smaller". Teach someone how to code, and it might be a complete life changer. I run a coding school and we offer free sits for people who need it, and we're greatly satisfied. We've seen students working for McDonald's, for 10 hours per day making just minimum wage, move to a software company with a $+90K salary and changing their lives completely.
Share what you know, try to fix the problems that humanity faces. Don't try to do everything just by yourself. But your "tiny" collaboration ads up.
That sounds vague, so an example might be nice. I travelled to Oaxaca recently and toured around a bunch of palenques (mezcal distilleries) to see how folks did their work. It sounded like there's an enormous problem with overcultivation of maguey — a plant that needs 30-some years to mature in some cases. I thought maybe an app that could identify + track maguey would help. I talked about it with folks, and realized that the problem isn't that they don't know where the plants are, or that they don't know how long they should grow for. It's that there's too much demand for what the ecology can bear, and a lot of it gets carted off to Jalisco to fill tequila bottles before it's mature.
In that light, an app for identifying + tracking maguey isn't really gonna help. But now I have the contacts, they know I want to help, and we can keep talking about what they're working on. Maybe it'll line up. But it's uncertain. And frankly, that's how this stuff works — whether you're building something in the hopes of getting into YC, or building something to help out humankind. Just because you can earn a paycheque writing code doesn't mean you can identify and fill a new need with that same skillset.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iGCVRA7T7FE
They talk about using the metric of "how many lives can be saved" with your cash.
ABSTRACT
People admire doctors and rescue workers and marvel at the possibility of saving someone's life -- something that few of us would ever achieve. And yet at the same time, we routinely hear that for a small sum of money we could save someone's life in a developing country and this scarcely impacts our behaviour. There is an important disconnect between these two attitudes and it has serious moral implications. I will speak about the evidence which shows that we really can make a tremendous difference by giving, and then explore the moral case for giving much more than we typically do. I will then look at the great disparity in effectiveness between different charities and show how choosing where to give can be even more important than the decision to give in the first place.
Tracking homeless individuals is an incredibly challenging task, even without considering the tech. For example, my girlfriend works in macro-level social work primarily focusing on the homeless population. (She and I are data geeks so we talk about this a lot). She currently works at a shelter where they are trying to identify the homeless citizens who cost hospitals and medicaid the most money, because there's some insane distribution of costs such that something like 1% of the patients account for 90% of the costs. She can't get any cost data from hospitals though, because they refuse to disclose it, even anonymized. Medicaid only has part of the data at best and the government officials there haven't been responsive to her requests. So she can only get the cost data by getting individual clients to sign consent forms. Which is methodologically troublesome because she only has access to the clients that happen to come to her shelter and many of the highest cost patients are specifically those who don't go to shelters and instead end up in the hospital due to exposure/hypothermia/etc. Point being, she can't get the necessary data in the first place, never mind that she doesn't have anywhere to store it.
Beyond tracking individuals, the data problems in the field are enormous and I think that may be where you can make the most difference. Even within her one agency, she can't get a lot of the basic data to evaluate programs because the agency has not invested any money in tech for 15 years. Primarily because they can barely afford to stay open. So they've got tons of legacy systems with data scattered around. No one knows where anything is, and even if they did know where to find data, they wouldn't know how to aggregate it or display it in a useful manner.
This is a common problem for community services organizations. They are chronically underfunded and tend to be run by people with little expertise in tech. And the staff tend not to be much more qualified. My girlfriend asked their in-house accountant for a list of expenses related to a specific set of grants the other day. The accountant sent her a part of the general ledger, which is incomprehensible to anyone who isn't familiar with accounting (and it was the wrong part, but that's another story). She also went to a program director and requested some demographic data that was required for reporting under the grants. Turns out he hadn't been collecting it.
Anyway, my point is that it would be helpful for many of these shelters and agencies to have a consolidated information system. So, for example, they can enter information about a grant they've received, including important dates and reporting requirements. And then have some tool to ensure that the program director is aware of and meeting those requirements.
So far, my girlfriend's biggest data/tech success at this agency has been a project I helped her code. The head fundraiser has to fill out a ridiculous number of grant applications every month. They are all in PDF and mostly request the same kinds of information (agency location, purpose, intended use of grant, etc.). So we wrote a program that takes a canned set of responses and automatically inserts them into the PDFs, so that the fundraiser only has to enter answers for non-standard questions. It then auto-updates their grant tracking system. It's cut down on the time they spend processing applications tremendously.
It would work a lot better if there was an integrated information system from which we could pull a lot of that data automatically, because currently it requires the fundraiser to keep the underlying data store up to date manually.
The big focus is helping students identify and fix mistakes in their code in a friendly and approachable manner.
It's not glamorous, but if you're willing to volunteer your time helping with an org's Wordpress site or making sure everyone is educated about phishing and 2FA, you can make a meaningful impact in your community.
For us we wanted to help people who were skilled, but ended up washing dishes, as they did not understand the Danish culture. We made NemCV.com to make them CVs in 2011. The website is now defunct, but since we cared about helping people we turned into a real life event to help people and has helped 1000s of people into a better life here in Denmark, and continues several times a month to this day:
https://www.meetup.com/get-your-dream-job/
So, find the problem first, and then spend time helping and make an IT tool IF needed!
"Fixing world with software" nowadays cynically means just "to build closed platform and seek for rent".
Also, everything that has to do with food is tangible and understandable by every single person in this world.
Open source tax-calculator for tax policy analysis. Used by many policymakers to inform their decisions about tax policy via the TaxBrain GUI (https://www.ospc.org/taxbrain). Influences decisions that affect hundreds of millions of lives.
That is to say, there are probably hundreds of things, off the top of your head, that bother you and probably bother others. To the best of your ability choose one that you have a clear "thread to pull on" - as in, there is an action here you could take that might not be elegant, might not scale, be politically heated, or put you in a position beyond your understanding, ultimately require a team or need financing. But you could do it NOW and not just dream about it, consequences be damned. When the potential is scary like that, that means you actually hold a lot of leverage to unleash new forces, just by starting on it and not stopping.
Most of software isn't like that: it's predictable in its design, it automates a thing that was done slower or less effectively before. It fits into the system and stays within the lines. So you also won't find many examples for the particular thread you're pulling on, and that's expected.
If you do this and it's something you personally care about and will pour heart and soul into, you're doing about as much as anyone could hope for. You won't and can't get all of it right - but what people need isn't perfection, so much as a vehicle that will last well enough for the journey.
[0] http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2016/06/27/heres...
And I'm pretty sure most of it would fly in the face of just about every conventional human morality (which comes about largely for self serving purposes in my opinion).
Our horizons of view are necessarily limited by the narrow slice of space and time we occupy and the culture in which we come to conceive the world. We can break out a little from time to time but for the most part we can't separate our innate ideas of "social good" from that which more objectively probably is better for the species.
I understand the sentiment. I thought about it a lot. As I got older I realized the important things in society are the little things. We are individuals, there are millions of us. We generally won't dramatically alter the course of history but the way we treat others personally, the way we conduct our affairs, our character as individuals, that's what makes up a society. We have to eat and drink. It's part of life. So we sometimes have to do things that we'd rather not. But we can try to minimize our negative impact.
Also I think we partially got where we are right now because some of our ancestors were basically beasts who killed the competition and took their women. And if that hadn't happened at some level regularly we'd probably still be swinging from trees and eating seasonal fruit. I'm not sure I want to know what the implication of that is. But I try to live in peace and stay balanced which means not worrying about saving the world all the time. Because it truly cannot be saved but maybe you can be. And a few others.
Wait, what?
All anecdotal, of course.
My guess is that parent sees comments that recommend a different means to the same end we all generally believe in, and views those as disregard for humans.
Same goes for making a service cheaper at the expense of the workers and the list goes on...
You can't be binary about this.
In many situations, selling a service has made the world (or at least a city/country) a better place.
Private cell phone service in many developing countries, for example. I know countries where, before they came in, people would have to wait years to get a landline (some in excess of 10 years). Private companies swooped in and gave people access (at least those who could afford it). Imagine how limited your life would be if you didn't have any phone (and that includes no Internet).
Sometimes giving to charity is better. At other times, it's non-sustaining and you need some kind of profit model. Both can benefit society.
HN and the HN demographic are strongly interested in preserving/advancing a particular social order; one that is largely detrimental to most of humanity.
I checked that thread, and the detached subthreads appear to be either tangential or uncivil. I see little evidence of the pro-slavery agenda you allude to.
Both of these are outright lies. You can dress them however you want if you dare to reply but these are lies.
And why bother? It's not as if everyone can go check the discussion and see that these are lies. Weird.
If OP doesn't see donating to charity as interest in the well-being of society then let's just admit that the parent isn't so much concerned about whether or not HN is interested in the well-being of society so much as if HN wants to contribute to the well-being of society in the same way the parent would. Thus, parent really should say, "HN doesnt seem to agree with my particular persuasion as to how one creates well-being in society."
Donating to charity is, almost by definition, interest in the wellbeing of society.
Also, if you're going to be paid $100k at Facebook that means the value you provide is >= $100k to Facebook. It does not mean that your work is objectively worth $100k anywhere you could go. There's some correlation, of course, but I think given the context it's an important distinction to make.
As an aside, it's entirely possible for me to imagine a scenario in which the most beneficial thing one could do for society is utilize the scale and reach of Facebook. I doubt that the vast majority of the work at Facebook is that specifically, but it's certainly possible to imagine.
...or dodging taxes while getting good PR and also giving jobs to people in your own country (instead of elsewhere)?
The cost of the donation always exceeds the tax benefit.
People do things like setup foundations and then appoint people to work for them, but that still doesn't allow the money to be kept without paying taxes on it (the foundation has to engage in bona fide charitable activities to maintain tax status).
It's a failure of imagination to assume that you can do more good for the world as programmer #9001 at Facebook who donates some of his income to effective altruism than as a programmer who adds all of her value to some other cause.
Consider law, for example. To use round numbers, biglaw mid-career in NYC could target $500k/yr, and plenty of lawyers are working for non-profits at $50k/yr. So one could choose to take the $500k/yr, plus donate enough to a non-profit to hire two people full time. Now you have 2x your "more than x value".
The numbers in tech are actually not much different, for certain skill sets. It's also important to remember that skill sets are not fungible this way. I could be really good at something HFT or OR companies really want, but only middling at what a non-profit needs. This affords a sort of arbitrage opportunity.
Another option - chase a high paying career for 10-15 years, retire with a modest but secure income, move to a cheaper location and volunteer the remainder of your working life to charities.
etc. etc. be imaginative.
Luckily, these days there are an abundance of ways you can 1) make money, 2) work on interesting problems, 3) work with amazing people, and 4) do social good. You used to have to choose 2 or 3 of those things, but no longer. I run a nonprofit organization that highlights these opportunities: http://impact.tech/
I also run a VC fund that supports these sorts of startups. You can see an example of the companies we back here: http://www.fifty.vc/companies/
If anyone is considering jumping into the social impact startup space, feel free to drop me a line and I can help you navigate the opportunities. First name AT the URL of the nonprofit I mentioned.
Unspecific suggestions like this are the reason people get lost and resume the attitude you're deriding.
Or as mentioned above - just donate some of that sweet, sweet cash that tech workers are making hand over fist compared to nearly every other occupation.
> Unspecific suggestions like this are the reason people get lost and resume the attitude you're deriding.
Yes, surely those people bear no responsibility around their personal level of civic engagement.
"Those people" started this thread and asked for specifics.
> Find groups that interest you and are effective in their mission.
That's what the poster is doing.
I don't disagree with your sentiment; the answer to "how do I do good?" isn't just going to be handed to you. I suppose I was prompted to jump in because I think somebody might otherwise confuse your comment for being a useful answer to the original topic.
Doing the lord's work, right here ...
It's called "social good" nowadays.
However, you can still make a big difference for groups much smaller than the whole species (and I think that's actually preferable from a human point of view because it's more tangible). The world is full of problems that could easily be solved by good software. This is especially true in industries that are usually not very technological by themselves.
Depending on your current network you might have gotten to know an industry or two that is not strictly technological. If not, ask your friends who do not program software all day and ask them what problems they have at work that they find annoying and try to come up with a software solution for that.
Once you do that, convince their bosses that it saves them more money to pay for your software than to do things the old way.
Teach Python to girls in Zimbabwe: https://www.zimbopy.com/become-a-mentor
The goal is to help humanitarian organizations solve technology problems with open source solutions. This excellent group of people are developing solutions to common problems like logistical, and communication issues that help improve humanitarian aid.
You can see the source code on their github: https://github.com/htbox/
If you are interested, you can hear more about it by listening to Richard Campbell on this podcast and many others like it: http://www.podcastchart.com/podcasts/herding-code/episodes/h...
https://www.fsf.org/campaigns/priority-projects/
• Free phone operating system: https://www.fsf.org/campaigns/priority-projects/free-phone
• Decentralization, federation, and self-hosting: https://www.fsf.org/campaigns/priority-projects/decentraliza...
• Free drivers, firmware, and hardware designs: https://www.fsf.org/campaigns/priority-projects/hardware-fir...
• Real-time voice and video chat: https://www.fsf.org/campaigns/priority-projects/voicevideoch...
• Encourage contribution by people underrepresented in the community: https://www.fsf.org/campaigns/priority-projects/contribute
• Free software and accessibility: https://www.fsf.org/campaigns/priority-projects/accessibilit...
• Internationalization of free software: https://www.fsf.org/campaigns/priority-projects/internationa...
• Security by and for free software: https://www.fsf.org/campaigns/priority-projects/security-by-...
• Intelligent personal assistant: https://www.fsf.org/campaigns/priority-projects/personalassi...
• Help GNU/Linux distributions be committed to freedom: https://www.fsf.org/campaigns/priority-projects/help-gnu-lin...
• Free software adoption by governments: http://www.fsf.org/campaigns/priority-projects/free-software...
Simple, but takes a lot of time, patience, listening, and humility. You can't go in thinking you have the answers, it's got to be a collaborative process.
Don't work towards maximizing the utility of everyone, it's nonsense. People aren't that cooperative, even. Work towards bounding the minimum utility. There's lots of social and physical extinction events that humanity faces. Even if you have nothing directly to contribute to these problems, perhaps you can realistically contribute to the welfare of other people who are contributing to these problems.
There's some important things that can make a lasting difference, beginning with ensuring there's something you care about, possibly obscure, but important, for possibly a long time. A big part of this is learning about what the issues are and their impacts.
To help pick a problem or area you care about.. there are things that you are naturally drawn to and can't help yourself with.
It's not a bad place to start looking for problems (and other people trying to make a difference) you care about and want to add value to is an important consideration.
Why? The most important thing I experience is the importance of always adding value first, and finding a way to do it. It simply opens more doors and opportunities than anything else I've ever experienced.
From a tech perspective, many social enterprises, groups can benefit from basic mobile apps or tools for the people they work with. The skillset here isn't the hard thing to find, it's a willingness to learn and only then solve problems even if they aren't new or interesting but deliver great value.
If you can help someone save a few hours a week with 10-15 minutes of making an excel sheet, it is a greater help and a start.
All big problems begin as and consist of a lot of smaller problems.
A secret of finding interesting projects that can grow, is that the willingness to solve small problems, because small problems leads to large problems on their own. Almost all of my multi-industry experience is due to the transferability of solving similar problems.
With this in mind, social good can happen independently, with a group, from an initiative at work, and not just exclusively from working with non-profits. Help where no one's helping and you'll find lots of opportunities to add value.
There are a ton of projects you can jump on aimed at helping to get progressives elected and enact progressive policies. For those not familiar with progressive politics (or at least not beyond Bernie or whatever), the basic idea is to make it easier for people to get involved with government. For example, making it easier to to figure out which elections you're eligible to participate in as a candidate and/or as a voter.
But in my ten years' experience, here's what I see as the biggest potential for tech for social good: open data standards for constituent communications. Breaking public messages out of the current silo's of individual e-mails, e-petitions, social media, civic tech apps, and issue advocacy platforms. Making possible open structured data on real public priorities and policy preferences in every Congressional district. This never took off because government offices haven't wanted such a level of participatory democracy, and because existing advocacy groups haven't wanted to share membership lists and enable peer-to-peer organizing - it would undercut the business models of e-petition companies and legacy advocacy vendors and VC-backed civic startups. But making public opinion info more free and open for analysis could push forward reforms that have wide support, and are stymied by the current U.S. two-party system: http://www.participatorypolitics.org/open-data-infrastructur...
We have a yearly, paid, 5 month long fellowship in Brooklyn for mid-career engineers, designs, and product managers that combines human centered design and Lean Startup to build tech ventures that fight poverty.
https://joinpropel.com came out of our fellowship and just raised a seed round from Andreesen Horowitz.
Our website: https://labs.robinhood.org
Check out the documentary Cowspiracy (free on Netflix) to see what I'm talking about.
I'll take this opportunity to float an idea that's been kicking around in my head for a long time.
The premise is to:
1) (this is almost certainly the easy part) build out a platform that is like a two-way khan academy - teacher and student, with at least the teacher having a tablet and a stylus that function well, sharing a digital blackboard, with a video chat optional -- where a student of something in a relatively privileged situation teaches a student of the same thing in a relatively less privileged situation -- where the sessions are stored and rewindable, both video and blackboard input.
2) the hard part; selling it as something to invest in and driving it to a point of having an endowment behind it, like Harvard's endowment, that allows the service to pay for moderation of student-teachers something like $12.00 USD an hour to teach, while subsidizing well-chosen students to have to pay something like $2 an hour to learn
it's been an idea for a passion project for a while
In the world of retail many companies have to train sales staff in third party dealerships, this can be with lots of site visits and with those staff doing some away day thing. The reason for this sales training is so products can be demonstrated and those sales converted by knowledgeable staff.
So you find your market in this type of a business and solve the challenges. There will be plenty in keeping company staff trained and on-board, with a long-term relationship with them selling stuff they get training updates about. You tailor your solution to different verticals and when you have a base product that can be tailored to your customers you then do your project version as that 'base product'.
So maybe do this the hard way, put in some time being that person that does company training materials, build out whatever is needed for doing that much, much better, pioneer it with the company that you work for, and on their clock, put in a lot of work needed to build out the backend and support needed for your big idea, then leave to polish it off knowing you have a commercial version out there and proven to be good (hopefully!).
Whilst you are doing this you might also want to help or support those around you on a friendly basis rather than as part of an organisation. Just being a friend to an elderly neighbour, having time for them and being willing to help them get their teevee plugged in correctly is pretty good. You can also be there for others that have problems of the mind or of the body that you are glad you are not afflicted by. Through maintaining friendships and looking out for a few vulnerable souls from different walks of life to yourself you can learn immense things about the human condition. You can also change people's lives with money and learn the nuances of that. There are no tax deductions or medals for making charity something you do informally, the whole world is not going to care if you walk the old guy's dog for him every morning.
I personally have been at Chimp for over 5 years. I can tell you that it’s a pretty amazing feeling to come into work every day, sit in a comfy chair, wiggle my fingers on a keyboard and, as a result, help get hundreds of millions of dollars flowing into the charitable sector. All while getting paid a competitive salary at a stable company that’s poised for massive growth.
If this sounds interesting, checkout https://chimp.net/careers or email jobs@chimp.net if you don’t see a role posted that matches your skill set. Again, we’ll always connect with talented people that we think we can work with.
A recruiter shot a job across my email a few months back about using technology to get people more active in government. Depending on how you feel about government, that could be taken to any number of applications, with some company filling the niche along the way.
I work in education, myself, and I find that pretty rewarding. Being able to use technology to help teachers do something even a little bit easier is a good feeling.
Even though these scenarios are very different, they all help advance individuals and the species in their own micro and macro ways. Tech is useful everywhere, so decide who you want to help, and find companies that exist to help those people and go from there. And if you don't find a company there, then maybe you have your YC interview already cooking.
I'm working on the 1st live online school that teaches kids to code. It's nearly impossible for parents to find teachers locally between 4-7PM, especially at a reasonable price, so come help :)
Disaster Management Software EMS Software Assistance software for the blind,deaf,etc.
Of course, not everything becomes magically better from software's involvement. There might be some good opportunities in robotics, robotic medical care and elderly care especially come to mind.
We make software which facilitates the organ, tissue and eye donation process in partnership with a number of other organizations and non-profits. It's really rewarding work.
I have a list of resources that I collected while I was searching as well:
- The Fast Forward accelerator's tech nonprofits job board and directory. This is easily the most extensive list I found: https://www.ffwd.org/tech-nonprofit-jobs/, https://www.ffwd.org/tech-nonprofits/
- The YC-funded non-profits (subset here https://github.com/smartergiving/open-data/blob/master/v0/fu...)
- The well-known non-profits: Mozilla, Wikimedia, Khan Academy
- https://twitter.com/goodtechjobs
- Code for America is hiring, takes fellows, and has a government job board: https://jobs.codeforamerica.org/
- Tech co-ops: https://techworker.coop/members
- Angel list nonprofits: https://angel.co/nonprofits
- Some other random social good orgs that I found were hiring in the SF area or remote: Open Whisper Systems, Binti, Nuna, The Human Diagnosis project, Bayes Impact, Nava, GovEx, Democracy Works, The Guardian Project, The Internet Archive, EFF, Exygy, Open Law Lib, Angaza, Fight for the Future,
- An article written by the co-founder of Bayes Impact for techcrunch: https://techcrunch.com/2017/04/25/a-call-to-action-for-tech/
- Civic Makers (http://civicmakers.com/) has a newsletter highlighting civic news
I also second the progressive coder's network.
We're needing generalist full-stack engineers, as well as lead engineers in the areas of data, devops, and security: https://binti.com/binti-careers/
Sometimes our nonprofits post iOS/Android prototyping projects, for example.
1. identify the main threats to mankind
- degradation of biodiversity, for humans, animals, and flora (climate change, pollution, over-production, you name it)
- nuclear damages (power plants, bomb, wastes)
- natural causes (meteorites, earthquakes, volcanos, solar flares)
2. analyse the roots of those (examples)
- technical limitations
- economically not sustanable
- pursuit of profit
- natural but avoidable
- natural and inevitable
Do a maximum of research for those points, and pick a cause that motivates you the most.
I, as a developper would personally aim to protect the internet, to have a free and truthful network to share knowledge.
With knowledge and science we can aim to have a global awareness of our impact on humankind's future.
I'm striving for a ressourced based economy, and leave that capitalistic aberration that the Gross domestic product (GDP) is coming from the amout of money spent, which means the more you consume (food, equipment, energy, health care, ...) the higher the GDP will be
I'm currently working on version 2 which returns a lot of stastical information, allows for graphs and better statistics to be shown on stream overlays and a back end console for auditing and reporting purposes.
I am currently breaking up each part and exposing them over HTTP APIs to allow future integrations and to allow the system to scale for large streaming events such as Special Effect's Gameblast.
The gaming for good initiative is ripe for new tools and services, as there are very few players in this space, to the end where I thought that I was the only one with this idea up until a few months ago.
Feel free to let me know if you have any questions, on HN or by email at sdimantha(at)petersonhealthcare(dot)org.
Here is one of the engineering roles we are recruiting for (more to be announced later) - http://petersonhealthcare.org/careers/software-engineering-t...
The basic idea is to bring together a person who knows of a specific social issue, and a tech person who wants to help solve it. Together they are the core team and are helped to work on their project, form a non-profit, get conmections etc.
At the moment the program is piloting in Berlin. It's planned to expand to Hungary, Austria and ideally other areas. If you are interested, drop by at one of the barcamp/unconference events or check out the website. :)
If you have time, you can also build a useful side project.
For me -
Youtube and Reddit give a lot of weight to popular content. If you're trying to learn new ideas, videos with conspiracy theories, popular speakers, and things people already know dominate search results / subreddits.
My project (https://www.findlectures.com) recommends high quality content, but across as much topic variety as I can find (discourages ignoring speakers based on demographics or them not marketing their talks well).
Our current volunteer developer initiative is called Voices for Democracy, and is focused on creating tools to advance the discourse between people with their elected representatives.
If this excites you, or if you'd like to learn more about other opportunities to use your skills for good, check out twilio.org and send us a note.
Thanks for starting this awesome thread.
-Jacob from twilio.org
https://archive.org/details/ShmooCon2017#
Then go to video 20 (friday night firetalks) and skip forward to 1:31:55 theres a talk called "You can do the thing".
tl;dw - Theres a lot of help that can be done by finding local orgs that you agree with, and offering to modernize their websites, help manage IT, and so on.
Oftentimes, research code that has clear social good potential ends up never getting deployed. We're trying a new form of creating social good opportunities from within the academic setting and through a non-profit vehicle managed like a Bay Area tech startup. I think we'll start to see more entities like this emerge.
We believe that peer-to-peer, community driven, education is one of the best ways that our small team can meaningfully impact the world.
The more effectively we can disseminate meaningful information, while also building connections between people, the easier it becomes to solve every other world problem.
Always looking for more collaborators, so feel free to email me: John@helpwith.co
It would be interesting to point at the genes for the heritability of IQ for giggles. We are all data, the meat is what matters. The life you save may be your own.
So I guess that suggestion is less exciting.
I myself, work mainly on projects related to museums, culture, green economy... In the projects I accept I try to find a balance between money I can get and how I view it as work for the greater good. A very hard balance and a very subjective one.
Also have some friends that are a lot into open data which is also an interesting area to explore.
Converting chapel from 1838 into visionary environment to realise human potential and heal the planet.
No more BS jobs but flow state, peak performance, deep focus, quality work on projects that truly matter.
(I did my fair share of man hours stuck in chair, now making conscious deliberate effort to set free)
Another good resource: https://80000hours.org/
We measure paper consumption for businesses, equate that to forest impact, then automate the planting of those trees back into the environment at planting projects around the world. We're always looking for talented designers and developers that want to do social and environmental good through technology.
so, I'm trying to help people make cognitive and behavioral improvements in their lives with my side project (http://willyoudidyou.com)
"Data science competitions to save the world"
OK, the tag line might be a bit much, but here's a snippet from one of their current competitions:
Your goal is to create better models to estimate populations for hard-to-reach sites in the Antarctic, and thereby greatly improve our ability to use penguins to monitor the health of the Southern Ocean!
I personally think we need better ways and more people to know about better ways to aggregate social preferences. If people knew about alternative voting methods they might entertain using them. You could work on coding implementations that would introduce the masses to alternatives.
#YesWeCode is a national initiative to help 100,000 young women and men from underrepresented backgrounds find success in the tech sector
The idea you can _do anything_ to _help_. Is mostly a myth people repeat so they don't constantly feel like shit for doing nothing in the face of mass social injustice by which they are (partially) the benefactors.
If you want social change, you need social action. Anything short is just rationalizing your guilt.
But nonetheless I do agree with the final output.
An individual is largely incapable of doing anything ALONE. Only thought organized and mass action are things accomplished on societal scale.
Change requires work... this is physics. A large change requires a lot of work. If your force is too small (an individual). You may never over come friction.
If you want social change, you need organization.
Effort exerted without results is technically doing something. You are burning energy. But you are not making change happen, you are NOT doing work.
But to approach the problem of "doing good" with the mindset of "the only thing that I can do is to ask other people to make the world a better place" is selling yourself short and in my opinion an anti-democratic way of thinking.
Individuals can do exactly what they can do. You can volunteer at a school, you can start a community garden, you can help just one person in your life who needs it. This counts as doing good, and without the kind of community that forms from lots of people spending their time with others, you have to ask yourself why you should care about the political action at all. Far too much political action today is done out of self-righteousness or anger, rather than out of love. If you've forgotten how to love a stranger in your private life, you may have forgotten how to do it in your public (political) life too.
People getting what they want is neither good nor bad; it is effective at distributing resources. But this is distribution isnt inherently good either (effective != good).
We don't need to define "Good" in order to observe this. Very few definitions by anyone, let alone OP, produce this equivalence.
https://www.torproject.org/getinvolved/volunteer.html.en#Pro...
An open source tool to help engineers install renewable energy equipment offshore. Wind, wave, tide (one day!) etc
* Program for charities * Make Reddit style voting for political topics * Invent an econmic system that saves the planet * Work on blockchain projects for good for all * Contribute to open source projects
Educational tools are also good investments of time, IMO.
This is the core problem here: I could personally name a ton of industries and endeavors that could use software to be better - but finding a particular need and someone willing to work with you on fulfilling that need? That feels incredibly hard.
Don't know if it's still active, but the idea (and the founder) behind it was really about making the world a better place.
Check out: https://gazaskygeeks.com/
#1 Take care about your own family and children #2 Do not harm others
Then, it becomes very easy to cause harm to others and justify it through the idea that one's first priority is taking care of your own family and children and that outweighs the harm you are doing to others.
Which is just to say, it's not that simple.
I used a not ordered list. That makes it so simple.
http://www.givewell.org/charities/against-malaria-foundation
so, your problem was: your data before decision were not enough and the analysis of the situation (in the whole world) not deep enough. some people will argue: so much data - never possible to make the best decision. I agree with it. But you can do some approximation and before doing an (also only aproximated) List of "good, selfless, altruistic" destinations (with view of whole world and view to some influence like climate, politics, geophysics, space-riscs ... and so on.) make a risc and a potencial map about the world. And second part construct your own priority List for this risc and potencials. Big project - but also big fun! So go web and search for science studys, travel around the globe, talk to many people, educate kids, help older people with desease - so you get a good (eventually excellent) database. Work out a mind set of gouls, of answers for the question "what is good (for my neighbor)". Your longtime values. But you will not forget the borders of your brain: for example - you are a good coder and engineer, and not so good corner speaker ... so go politics as job would not good decision, because your influence will go zero and as coder zero++ ... ;-) But you will not forget the borders of others brain: for example - you everytime check different (also antagonistic) sources of the data for your decisions. And if somebody troll you - be calm: very good input for your decision - database (part:psycho-problems)!
And think of the time of your live: its all in move, you must check in some weeks or months again and again, the same procedure .. (Will be fine: DO WHILE(true)) ask, analyse, check, do - a simple and fine procedure in a endless loop: your live. and the backup loop is: ask one more question everytime, everywhere - to everybody ... Find the position were you with your (everytime living) "database" can make the most influence to the "problem-vector" of the world. then so you also will make some mistakes, errors appeare again and again, BUT: then you are old and grey you can say: I had done best of my willnes, my power and what my brain was able to think: attempt(sic!) to change the world to a better one. A (only limited) list of my own tasks (differ already to the list of my son, friends) : - participation, transparency with (for example) openData Apps - - networking: bring together good coders amd other - identify deficites in care for older people - organise help and also change of the reasons - ... and so on the list is under construction and any bugs I must find out next days ... ;-) Wish you a good and viable decision for your dream - job! CU
As an individual how are you doing? Is your life in order? You're doing OK, those you love are doing well, things are good?
Education then.
The borrowings from Greeks and Romans (and in the later times British) in progressive European nations are self-evident.
I agree that we have an overpopulation issue, we don't have the resources to support this many people currently. But calling people parasites is probably getting you downvoted.
Ps.: In tech & programming specifically, I think Free Software is a beautiful idea.
Ps.: I`ll add, why I think this is(my original point), is that I think it's very nice to understand(or try to understand) what is the `structure/mechaniscs of the world`, I mean, to me it would be the same to study capitalism as it is to study anticapitalism(that is, the more you see how it works, the more you`ll see stuff that is flawed), some would disagree with this, of course. Contrary to what many think, ideology to me means NOT seeing reality as it is(so I'm not talking about intantile, superficial, ideas/agenda here), so I think it's absolutely fair the everybody should take some understanding of it based on people who wanted to figure out found out, even if not 100%. Since the more correct is your model of things, the better you can act on them(you can't engineer a car with wrong math, for example). To me, personally, getting my mind out of the techie neophile mindset and knowing broader and deeper stuff gives me plenty of ideas on things to do. Even more so, that since I'm using this 'footing', I can then try to see if it matches reality and goes on to have real-world effects! ;P But anyway, what I`m saying is sort of a longer road, to try to get interested and understand other topics and then look to your habilities and see what you can do with them about the other thing. That's where the project I'm trying to work on came from and it's really meant to be a drop in the ocean and a simple program etc, but it's something I really care about since it's tied to deep layers of my person and perspective on `world`, `society`, `individuals`, `species`, etc.