* About
We are a volunteer run group of (mostly) developers who are committed to using our technical skills to help others through our mission:
To harness the cognitive surplus of the tech community towards building solutions to real problems in the world.
Read about the Dev Hatchery, the fantastic training ground which allows us to accomplish some amazing things!
We will never run out of a need for volunteers. The more volunteers we have, the more solutions we can develop.
We need developers of all skill levels and all platforms, mentors, designers, marketing, human resources, administrative...basically no matter what you do if you want to join us we will find a place for you.
CodeDoesGood was founded by 4 developers in Vancouver, BC Canada. Four skin tones, four races, four nationalities, four languages, four very different life experiences.
Our compiled life experiences mean at least one of us has first-hand experience of poverty, mental health issues, wildlife rescue, racism, international schooling, community arts, natural disasters, landing as a refugee, education, suicide, multi-ethnic families, fleeing violence, protesting, learning a new language, physical rehabilitation, immigration, ecological issues...
We have each seen and understood the world in individual ways and we each have different motivating values but deep down we do share one common goal: To Do Good
We saw two great problems, one in the world at large and one in the tech community.
The first problem we saw was that the high cost of software was eliminating technological solutions for volunteer-run organizations and those with low operating budgets. The people that run these groups are so driven they find a way to make a penny stretch a mile, but without technical volunteers to tap into, those pennies just can't stretch that far when it comes to software.
The second problem we saw was that the tech community at large is decrying the lack of experienced developers while an abundance of new developers are left flapping around like fish out of water with no guidance and no clear way to make the leap to become that experienced developer that everyone wants.
It seemed a rather obvious connection. Together these two problems are no longer problems but are instead each other's solutions. Rather than focussing on how to solve one, or the other, we realized that we need only to build a framework for these two issues to intersect and great things would happen!
When we were just getting started we put out a call for volunteers. We were hoping to get 10 volunteers. We wanted enough volunteers to run our inaugural project, Helping Hands. The idea was we were going to use this project to figure out our process. We put out a call to a Slack group, a couple LinkedIn groups, and a couple Reddit groups and we got an overwhelming response.
In fact, in response to those initial postings we had more than 150 people fill in our volunteer application and it became clear to us that that we really had hit a home run with this idea. Through those applications tech community told us how much they supported us, what a great idea they thought this was, and that they wanted to be apart of something great. We had a decision to make then: Either we abandon the idea completely or we move forward as a large international organization instead of the small group helping a few juniors like we had originally planned.
After much thought we went forward and our first 6 or so months was spent in a start up phase. We determined our infrastructure, documented our process, recruited more people to be part of our Board of Directors and our business team, and we did our best to build a large organization that can be volunteer run from the very beginning. Under the direction of our first President and founder Abbey Jackson, dozens of volunteers pitched in in areas they had no experience with. We all learned as we went and we built an amazing organization along the way.