Telecommuting Ruby on Rails developer for work on existing nonprofit site, and creation of a new site to help the poor

If you email us, it’s important to provide the information listed in the “Information we need” section below. If you have applied with us in the past, you are very welcome to apply for this. We are a small nonprofit organization and we were not able to reply to all of the applicants for our past openings. We are happy to consider you for this position.

EXISTING SITE

Our first Web site is below, and most of the first two months would probably be spent helping with it - mostly implementing new features, and doing some refactoring/optimization in some areas:

http://dailysource.org/

The site’s mission is to bring high-quality news and information from around the Internet to the public. You can read more about it here -

http://dailysource.org/about/site
http://dailysource.org/about/benefits

The site was chosen by PBS’ Media Shift blog as a top 5 trend to watch. We have some top journalists in the U.S. working and/or volunteering for us including; Laura Noueihed, who was the chief editor in charge of the night editions of the front page of the New York Times' Web site in the past; Vince Winkel, who has won 20 awards for excellence in journalism while working for places like CBS, NPR, CNN, and the BBC and who is the former operating editor of monitor.org; and Lynne Adams who headed up a 30 person division at the BBC covering international and national stories for their Web site and mobile platforms.

NEW SITE

This is the project you’ll be working on about 90% of the time after the first two months. Its focus is on helping the people in the world in the greatest need, especially the 2 billion extremely poor in Africa, Asia and Latin America who are trying to live on less than $2 a day:

http://leastof.org/about/intro
http://www.leastof.org/
http://leastof.org/about/samplepages

Check out the innovative World Wealth Calculator on the front page, that the top economist at the World Bank volunteered to help us create.

We are very excited about LeastOf.org and have received an extremely positive response to it so far. While we are on a somewhat small budget at the moment, we expect the site to eventually have tens of thousands of users and believe it will be a feather in the cap of whoever develops it. It will be a great portfolio builder and excellent basis for references. We are looking to make a big impact on the world with this project.

We developed DailySource using Ruby on Rails, MySQL, and a good amount of AJAX - and are looking to do the same with LeastOf.org.

INFORMATION WE NEED:

If you think you might be interested in these, please email the following to: developer (at) dailysource (dot) org:

* Your resume (or the equivalent information such as work experience and skills, or curriculum vitae)
* The number of hours per week you are available. We prefer 30 to 45, and will consider as low as 15 a week.
* How much you would charge per hour to work on these. Again, we are a nonprofit and do not have a large budget. In the past we’ve paid $10-$17 but we might be able to go a little higher depending on the candidate.
* If English is not your native tongue, please let us know the levels of your written and verbal English.

THE ROLE:

Telecommuting from anywhere in the world is possible. The times of day you do the work are totally flexible, though finding times 1-2 days a week to talk briefly via IM will be important.

The types of things we need done are -

* Helping design the architecture of the site
* Writing the code for the core functionality and features
* Ideally some systems admin work, and at the very least helping get the site back up if it’s down. Our current developer does some systems admin work, and we likely will have a very part-time sys admin to help us. If you’re good at sys admins, especially AWS’ Ec2, it’s a plus.
* Once the site is live - some occasional (about once a week) technical support mostly through email for our users.

We are forward-thinking and passionate about making the world a better place - particularly for those most in need.

We look forward to hearing from you,

Rachel

REQUIREMENTS:

The basic skills requirements are:

* Rails and Ruby.
* XHTML/CSS (not necessarily design).
* MySQL.
* Comfortable with Linux, Apache.
* Javascript and Javascript common libraries/toolkits.
* Ability to be highly organized, keep lists of numerous things you’re working on and keep track of time spent on items.
* Paying attention to details and thoroughness.
* Ability to take specs and turn them into functional features.
* Understanding how different parts of a system affect each other.
* Ability to communicate on a regular basis.
* Ability to be productive and follow-through.
* Familiarity with tools such as Git and Redmine is helpful, though these are pretty easy to figure out.
* Some basic graphic design/layout ability is a plus.