Accessibility and Open Source with High Fives Foundation
On a sunny January day in 2012, we signed a four month lease for a house in Tahoe City, California. The plan was to stay in Tahoe “just for the winter”. Six years and five months later, we’re still here.
We’re here because of the skiing, of course. We’re here because of the hiking, the backpacking, definitely. I’ll be honest though. You can do those things a lot of places. The real reason we stay is because of the feeling of community here. Whether we’re experiencing incredible powder days, droughts, days-long power outages, or a spectacular full moon, there’s always a feeling that we’re all in this together and from that interconnectedness comes positivity.
High Fives Foundation
In Tahoe, one of the truest examples of “we’re all in this together” is the High Fives Foundation. The High Fives mission is to support the dreams of outdoor action sports athletes by raising injury prevention awareness while providing resources and inspiration to those suffering life-altering injuries. High Fives is the safety net of our outdoor community.
The influence of High Fives can be felt far beyond Tahoe via grants given to athletes across the country and with the Military to the Mountain program.
The work that High Fives does is incredible, and we wanted to figure out a way to get involved. We aren’t adaptive sports coaches or trainers, but we noticed that the High Fives website was not accessible to all of the community. Perhaps we could use this opportunity to bridge both of our communities?
As developers, we need to keep our skills sharp, and the best way to do that is to practice committing code. Instead of committing throwaway projects to secret, private repos, we can contribute to open source projects. We’ll learn to collaborate on open source, and we’ll learn new technologies and new techniques.
The Goal: Assemble a Community of Volunteers
We want to create a website for High Fives that will prioritize accessibility to ensure that everyone can apply for grants and get information about High Fives programs. The plan is to make these projects open source so that anyone can contribute time to make a big impact. Along the way, developers who volunteer will upgrade their skills in technologies like React and GraphQL while making contributions to open source.
In April, we held a free GraphQL Workshop at Squaw Valley to encourage members of our community to get involved. Using the momentum from that class, we’ll be holding a hackathon on Saturday, June 30 to make progress on building out the High Fives site. Along the way, we’ll be testing everything we build with the best beta testers available: the High Fives athletes!
Beyond the hackathon, we plan to keep the open source projects active to support the development of a mobile app, enhance their data management infrastructure, and more. Join us. Learn with us. Your time as a developer is valuable, and together, we can make a huge impact.
Want to get involved? Have questions? Always feel free to get in touch with me on Twitter or follow the High Fives projects on GitHub. To learn more about how you can support the High Fives Foundation, visit their website.
