Volunteer with Vot-ER
A couple of folks involved in the Network have been exploring a partnership with an organization called (Vot-ER) https://vot-er.org/:
Vot-ER, is an organization at the crossroads of health and democracy that helps patients register to vote in healthcare settings. Vot-ER experienced rapid growth last year and partners with 500+ hospitals and 20,000+ healthcare workers to help register 50,000 voters. Our healthcare partners use our technology platform to order Healthy Democracy Kits, learn how to help their patients register to vote, and track their impact.
We are looking for technical contributors (JS stack – but JS experience not required) that can contribute to the development of a product having immediate impact in voter registration, but ALSO to help shape a contributor friendly project that can enable opportunities for developers of all skill levels to contribute to an impact project over the long run.
Commitment for this experimental partnership is:
- 2 months contributing to the project
- Onboarding session with the Executive Team on August 3rd OR August 5th at 1:30 ET
- Onboarding session with the Tech Team on August 5th at 5 pm ET
How to join:
If youʻre even a little bit interested, email btrevino@codeforamerica.org
More information
For schools/universities:
We want to pass along this opportunity to any interested students/student organizations. We are currently recruiting volunteer software engineers to help us build and maintain a new web app. This opportunity might be especially appealing to students interested in the overlap between tech and civics.
Minimum experience:
- Experience writing working, object-oriented code
- Comfort with setting up a development environment
- Experience with JavaScript will be helpful in getting up to speed, but isn’t strictly required
Our stack:
- Our web app is built in JavaScript, with a Node/Express backend and React/Redux frontend
- Currently deployed on Heroku with some components in AWS
- Ideally Dockerized by the end of the year
The Ask:
Last year was a rapid-paced and volatile election year, and we leaned heavily on no-code tools such as Google Analytics and Google Sheets as our stack. We want to use this year to reinvest in our technology and build a scalable web app. In particular, we’re focusing on empowering individual healthcare providers to track their individual impact and build a culture of civic engagement within their organization.
In this project, you’ll work with VotER’s tech team to map the user journey, gather requirements, prioritize high value features, and code features that enable healthcare providers to help patients register to vote.
For experienced software engineers, this project is an opportunity to volunteer with a highly engaged, tech-experienced non-profit. This project is core to VotER’s main mission and day-to-day operations, and the leadership team has spent significant time working through requirements and is heavily invested in a positive outcome.
For newer software engineers, this project is not just an opportunity to make an impact, but also to learn from experienced professionals. Improve your skills by writing clean, well-organized code that will be reviewed and commented on by more senior coders. Learn the challenges of standing up infrastructure and creating a full-stack application.
Because onboarding takes a significant investment from our team, we ask that volunteers choosing to engage with the project commit to a minimum of two months (though of course longer is always warmly welcomed). Informational sessions will take place in mid July with onboarding sessions shortly after. The tech team will meet for about an hour every week or two, usually in the evenings (between 4pm and 7pm EST), while tickets and code will be created and reviewed on an ongoing basis