I would like to allocate a portion of my time to charitable causes but I'm not sure where to start. Ideally, I would leverage my skills as a programmer to help a good cause and the work would be interesting.
First You are Awesome for wanting to help out!<p>Second I'll let you know that this is actually incredibly difficult. Generally speaking NPO (503Cs)aren't set up for technical volunteering. so you will have to search a little. They generally default to paying consultants mainly due to just a complete lack of familiarity.<p>Here's a couple of strategies:<p>- find a charity that you are interested in volunteering to. Charity Navigator keeps tabs on them and you can find a charity that fits what you are looking for. Email them and hopefully they will contact you about helping.<p>- Reach out to whatever University is in the area. The computer science department will often get requests for help with pro-bono projects... they can probably put you in touch with the right person/ project.<p>- <a href="https://www.donatecode.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.donatecode.com/</a><p>- Open source! Don't forget about open source projects. they need love too<p>- Organize Charity hackathons and get people together (Here's one we ran that was enjoyably successful: <a href="https://www.meetup.com/IPAs-and-APIs/events/249340851/" rel="nofollow">https://www.meetup.com/IPAs-and-APIs/events/249340851/</a>)<p>and lastly if you want to give us a hand we'd love some help (<a href="https://github.com/jppope/academic-intervention" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/jppope/academic-intervention</a> ). We're working on a project to help reproducibility and open access in science. We work on the project every Thursday night after work. We have a couple of PhD candidates advising and a small team of coders working on the build.<p>Hopefully these suggestions help! I've had similar problems trying to give my time and technical skills away for a good cause, so I feel your challenge.