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by mos_6502 1173 days ago
Personally, I use my spare time towards organizing a group that supports and nurtures developer communities in my area [1].

My organization is itself a 501c3, and our charitable mission is to provide developers with opportunities to learn and network. We do this by organizing monthly technical meetings, networking events, career panels, and hackathons. All at no cost to our members (no fees, tickets, or dues).

We also provide support to a larger network of meetup groups in the Tampa Bay area [2]. These groups are more specialized into specific disciplines/areas of interest. Many of these died out during the pandemic so rehabilitating that scene is an important mission for us as well.

[1] https://www.tampadevs.com/ [2] https://tampa.dev/

3 comments

Relatedly, but not charity itself, I try to stimulate open source communities by issuing a periodical[0] with easy tasks for beginners to contribute. By getting new people into open source they can hopefully become long term vectors for good work.

0: https://generativereview.substack.com/p/tasks-open-source-em...

Mozilla tags some Firefox (and other Mozilla projects’) bug reports as “good first bug” and adds a mentor to the bug.

Volunteer contributors can search these bugs by programming language or product area on https://codetribute.mozilla.org

Some volunteer contributors have become Mozilla employees (myself included :)

Very interesting and congratulations for working in the field of ethical software!
Very cool, one of our community members does something similar with local technology events: https://www.globalnerdy.com/the-tampa-bay-tech-events-mailin...
Thanks, and very nice mailing list, I’m checking it out!
I wonder if you have any spare/used ThinkPad/laptop that you can give to me for free? It will be life changing for me!

I'm currently really struggling in life (I barely eat once a day at the moment) but I'm really passionate about Linux/free software. So, a free laptop could really help me get local jobs (sysadmin or web developer for SMEs), put food on the table, & pay rent! Thanks!

What measures to rehabilitate the scene have you found most effective?
Honestly? It's as simple as organizing events, getting people together, and connecting them with one another. It takes some time, but the adage "If you build it, they will come" has a lot of truth to it.
Makes sense. Any style of in person event that you've especially liked?