community/

How to Help Snowdrift.coop Succeed

Want to see Snowdrift.coop achieve our mission? You can help!

If you don’t yet know all the core concepts, read the About pages and explore the main site itself.

To get an overview of what we’re working on now, see our planning and roadmap page.

If you’re ready to volunteer, one way to start is by telling us about your interests and skills. We can then direct you to where you can make the biggest difference.

Mimi & Eunice comic

Mimi & Eunice comic

As an ambitious, holistic project, we can use help with a wide range of topics covering technical, legal, and social challenges. Some details for different volunteer areas:

Get into the code

We mostly use Haskell, but there’s lots of HTML/CSS/Javascript things to do too.

  • For programmers and web designers, check out the source code and the documentation there, especially the contributing guide
  • Report to us about your experience getting the site built locally
  • Explore the code and/or ask us for guidance about how to get hacking
  • Participate in the Development area of our forum
  • We’re always happy to help coach you through getting started!

  • We need help finalizing our cooperative structure, nonprofit legal issues, handling of funds, and legal terms of use etc.

  • We could use help making sure our site terms and such are both legally sound and as ethical and readable as possible.

Design/UX

  • Please see the Design repository and the accompanying documentation for more details, along with a list of items where you could begin to help.

Research

  • Investigating services to use, partners to team up with, historical and scientific evidence to guide our decisions and presentation… See some of our work so far in the market research section of this wiki.

  • Our targeted messaging page in the Communications section is another good start looking at what we’ve already covered in describing the status quo of various project areas

Recruiters, trainers and organizers

  • Reach out to other sympathetic folks and to answer questions, such as by welcoming new visitors on the #snowdrift IRC channel or other sorts of publicity (see Communications).

  • We could use liaisons or recruiters for project subject areas (such as art, research, software, etc). The liaison will provide advice to the Snowdrift.coop team and to member projects and coordinate Snowdrift.coop outreach to the subject-area community.

  • Help facilitate meetings and discussion and guide (and improve) our working

  • process, governance, and team structure structure (see Governance)

Building new skills

We welcome volunteers to get involved and learn along the way. Volunteering with us can be a chance to learn programming and web design, study political/economic/legal topics or business management, and develop many other skills.

Note: whenever possible, we stick to free/libre/open tools and resources throughout our work.