Any advice on donating programming skills?
How did you find organizations/businesses/non-profits/just regular ol' people that needed help?
If you're employed did you have any issues balancing your time?
How was your experience?
If you're employed did you have any issues balancing your time?
How was your experience?
If you are employed, what disclosures do you need to provide to your employer? What disclosures do you need to provide to the folks you are helping? Check your contractual relationships for possible conflicts. Get written riders to contracts as needed.
Will you treat your programming as an "in-kind donation" for tax purposes? If so, you should check with your tax professional to find out exactly what is needed.
What will be the intellectual property status of what you create? If you are creating code or compiling data, who owns the results of your effort? If you are working as part of a large multi-participant project there needs to be a work-for-hire agreement for all concerned.
As with any project, you need to have a plan and execute to the plan but provide a way to adapt the plan as situations change. It is usually smart to define how decisions get made and who is responsible.
Finally, you need to consider what happens when the project is in production. How do bugs get fixed? Who is responsible for maintenance? Will you be supporting your creation forever?
Good points about disclosures, intellectual property, and never ending support. Makes me a bit weary.
There are tons of ways to donate time to charities. But yeah, time can be a factor if you're busy with work projects.
I used to balance military with donating time to an SPCA rescue unit. We did high-angle technical rescue of trapped animals. I did struggle balancing the two time-wise, but ended up being more of a do their website, help with exercises, photography, general dog's body... Great people and I loved helping out.
I'd totally recommend doing whatever you can...
One rarely-discussed issue is that most organizations, even the ones that say they want volunteers, don't actually: https://jakeseliger.com/2014/06/19/most-volunteering-is-a-wa... and the volunteering infrastructure is actually more expensive and difficult to maintain than actually hiring employees.
I like the advice someone else proffered: teach coding instead. There does seem to be a lot of demand for that, and the people trying to learn are likely to be motivated.
I was at a NY Tech meetup a few weeks ago, and there was an intro about TEALS where they were looking for people to teach high school students in the NYC high schools.