Volunteer Opportunity: Disaster Relief Supply Management Database

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* Volunteer Developer for Disaster Relief Database Feature Development *

Your time each week could help thousands of people! The Citizen Action Team (CAT), www.citizenactionteam.org), is a US-based nationwide group of volunteers. The team is looking for experienced web developers interested in learning Ruby on Rails or experienced Ruby on Rails programmers/developers to help maintain and develop features for an on-line Disaster Relief Supply Management Database. The database recently won the Organizer's Collaborative award for "Innovative Use of Technology" and has been used extensively during the aftermath of the Hurricane Katrina disaster.

If you qualify and are interested in our mission, please contact Terra Friedrichs: 978 266 2778 or terra@citizenactionteam.org.

The CAT database was launched quickly to respond to the Katrina disaster, using Rapid Application Development methods. Although the disaster is almost a year behind us, the Gulf is still in dire need. Hundreds of volunteers continue to work relief in the area and we are getting over 700 hits/day on this site, and it's on the rise. Servers from other countries are starting to hit the site. The database allows all the volunteers involved in Hurricane Relief to leverage their time by making the process of finding and placing supplies much easier. We're also excited about the potential for corporations to be able to use the database to donate excess supplies. We believe that this tool has long-term merit, as relief workers are also starting to use the site to address the needs of other US disasters. For example, relief organizations in New England responding to the floods and fires in that region are registering their needs on the database now. We hope to eventually bring this tool into the international disaster relief forum.

CAT is currently looking for volunteer programmers to help develop features for the database which was built using Ruby on Rals. Some requested features are relatively straight forward. Others are quite challenging. We need the programmer to help the team figure out what it needs, devise a strategy for developing the features and then do the programming/testing/launch so as not to disrupt on-going operations.

Although we would love to have people that are able to commit a lot of time to this project, we understand that the best people are always busy. We believe that we can meet the need for CAT with 10-15 hours of work a week from a good developer, for the first month or two and 5-10 hours/week on a continuing basis . If you get excited about the project and want to do more with the database, that would be great. We can probably fill up as much time as you are willing to give.

We are looking for the a developer with the following qualifications:

· Broad range of IT experience · Server admin experience · Experience developing with a variety of database tools · Rapid application development (versus old school development processes) · Open Source coding experience · Systems Integration experience · Proven record of design/test/launch of new features being integrated into an existing application · Access to a hosting setup

We are all volunteers and work our own hours from home. Occasionally there are conference calls, regarding feature definition and/or prioritization. We are looking for someone (with a sense of humor please!) who would enjoy the possibility of helping tens of thousands of people with a relatively small amount of your time.

Best, Terra Friederichs