We’re Building a Coderplex Volunteer Team
A week ago, we officially announced Coderplex, a non-profit startup that we’re building to improve the state of tech across Hyderabad and gradually across India. Our core effort right now is to design a better learning system, by figuring out how to create a culture of self-learning and peer-learning, and help people build genuine expertise in their domain of interest.
We have two main initiatives we’re working on right now to do that,
Creating Open Source Learning Guides — which are basically crowd-sourced recommendations of free online resources to learn and master every concept of every modern technology available out there. These guides’s put the structure in self-learning, they take you from theory, to practice and encourage you to build projects, collaborate with others and contribute to open source. You can check these guides on our GitHub, we’re in fact looking for more contributors!
Building Offline Co-learning Spaces — which basically are modern libraries, where people can take membership to come down, engage in self-learning, peer-learning and collaboration. These are dedicated physical spaces, with a dynamic learning environment where everyone learns at their own pace and compliments each other. They also have some weekly group activities like Open Source Evenings and some casual competitions.
We are building this organization as any other startup, by taking a very agile approach. In the past two week, we have actively been working on our website. On 23rd Oct, we released the first version of the website. We updated our landing page, learn, space and events page. It is still a static website, but functional and ready to use by our community.
We’re using Next.js on our frontend. We will be making our website dynamic from version two onwards, by building authentication and profiles. We’re using Django on the backend, and are actively looking for developers who can contribute both to our frontend as well as our backend. If you would like to be part of our core dev team, you can reach out to me directly.
Beyond building the website and our online learning platform, we’re making a lot of offline efforts. We will be publishing an article soon updating everyone with the status of our Hackerspace, and our plans for it going forward. But for now, what we want to focus on is rebuilding an active and vibrant developer community.
We have been hosting local meetups at the frequency of one per week since last one and half year, and have successfully built freeCodeCamp Hyderabad into one of the most active developer communities in the city. But we have been limited in our ability to produce value for and through our community, simply because of lack of sufficient engagement and collaboration to learn and build together.
Now that we've officially transformed our community into Coderplex, we’re trying to figure out what steps we can take to improve the engagement and value creation. And the idea that we love the most and have decided to explore right now is to build a active volunteer team first. An active group of people, a sub-set of our bigger community, who genuinely believe in our vision to improve the state of tech here, and who want to support us in getting there.
The purpose of the volunteer team would be to observe and improve the health of the overall community, and by health we mean the level of engagement, and the value we’re generating for each member. Ultimately, we at Coderplex want our members to be updated with the latest in tech, to easily learn and build genuine expertise in any technology that interests them, to build connections with developers of same interest and to get a job or start earning through their newly acquired skill. We simply want to enable each of our members in becoming objectively better developers.
The Coderplex Volunteer Team won’t function as any other volunteer team. They would be expected to engage in the culture we’re trying to develop, a culture of self-learning and collaboration, of solving problems and building things.
Here are some of the tasks that a volunteer would be expected to participate in :
- Actively learning something and sharing your progress with the community
- Contributing to our open source projects and learn guides
- Building your own open source projects to solve some problem
- Consuming and sharing interesting new tech news
- Engaging our community across social media
- Planing events (online and offline)
- Writing tech articles to our publication
As a volunteer, you can come forward with any new idea that you believe will add value to the community and contribute to the bigger picture we’re trying to build. By definition, you will only participate in activities that you voluntarily want to participate in. No task or expectation will be forced on you. If you at any point feel as if you cannot perform well with a certain task, you can forward it to others in the team.
We will have a online chatroom, on our Discord server, to keep in touch with everyone and be in sync to work towards our common goal. We will host active discussions within the team every month to review the work we’ve been doing, the value we’ve been able to generate, and any new idea or initiatives we can take up to improve the state of tech in Hyderabad.
If you believe in our vision, and think the work we’re doing is good, and would like to be part of this journey, you can fill the Application Form below and we’ll get back to your over mail or phone to confirm your involvement. What we’ll be looking for is simply how passionate are you about tech, and about the problem we’re trying to solve. We’ll also consider how much time you might be able to commit, keeping in mind the other priorities you might have in life, like college or office.
We’re excited to have you as part of our team!
If you have any questions about the volunteer team or about Coderplex, if you have any feedback or ideas you want to share with us, you can write to us at pr@coderplex.org.
