Hey Peter! :) Thanks for asking! Some of the things we want to do over the next year include:
1) Expand to offer more subjects. Students ask us all the time for tutoring in English and history. Someday we hope to offer tutoring in every common high school course, including foreign languages and computer science too!
2) Improve the reliability of the site. We have something like 100x as many tutoring sessions happening every day as we did last year, and we need to make substantial changes to the platform to keep up with the usage.
3) Upskill our volunteers to improve the quality of tutoring offered on the site. We want to offer additional training courses on tutoring skills and implement a peer feedback system so volunteers can help each other improve.
4) Reach more students! We want to get the word out to as many students as possible about our free service. If anyone reading can make an intro to a high school or nonprofit who needs us, we'd greatly appreciate your help.
Our long-term goal is to have engaging, fun feature work for community contributors to work on, and we do have those come up occasionally now, but we can use a lot of help just finishing our conversion of the backend to TypeScript, updating dependencies, small bug fixes and similar work, that we have issues ready for.
We also have a weekly tech community Zoom meeting that I'd be happy to send an invite for to anyone who emails me with interest. dave.sudia at upchieve dot org
Yes, that is great to hear! Pre-pandemic, Quill had the most luck with in-person hackathons, where folks could spend a day contributing to Quill, and some of those folks were then interested in staying connected with the work. Hopefully as those events return, you may be able to scale up your community building efforts.
That sounds like a great and ambitious roadmap Aly! :)
Best of luck scaling to support 100x users! In case you are not already using it, New Relic's new program for nonprofits provides their entire platform for free, and it can be really helpful for scaling by seeing how the app is performing. In case you are not already using it, here's the link: https://newrelic.com/blog/nerd-life/introducing-observabilit...
1) Expand to offer more subjects. Students ask us all the time for tutoring in English and history. Someday we hope to offer tutoring in every common high school course, including foreign languages and computer science too!
2) Improve the reliability of the site. We have something like 100x as many tutoring sessions happening every day as we did last year, and we need to make substantial changes to the platform to keep up with the usage.
3) Upskill our volunteers to improve the quality of tutoring offered on the site. We want to offer additional training courses on tutoring skills and implement a peer feedback system so volunteers can help each other improve.
4) Reach more students! We want to get the word out to as many students as possible about our free service. If anyone reading can make an intro to a high school or nonprofit who needs us, we'd greatly appreciate your help.