Telecommuting Ruby on Rails developer for Web site development for nonprofit organization

Company

DailySource.org

Job description

Telecommuting Ruby on Rails developer for Web site development for nonprofit organization Hello,

If you email us, you must provide the information listed in the “Information we need” section below. If you have applied with us in the past, you are welcome to re-apply. If your information is the same, you can refer us to your past application and we’ll find it. We were unable to interview more than 1 candidate from our last posting because our Executive Director had to go into the hospital for two surgeries. If your information is updated, please resend it to the address below.

OUR ORGANIZATION AND PROJECTS:

We are a non-profit organization whose mission is to bring high-quality news and information from around the Internet to the public. We are in the latter phases of developing our web site and looking for someone to take over development of it.

You can view our site at -

http://dailysource.org/

Or read more about us at:

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

While we are on a somewhat small budget at the moment, we expect the site to eventually have hundreds of thousands of readers and believe it will be a real feather in the cap of whoever develops it. It will be a great portfolio builder and excellent basis for references. We are also providing an important public service. If you are unfamiliar with the current problems in the media and how it impacts the public, details are here -

http://dailysource.org/about/problems

We have some top journalists in the U.S. working and/or volunteering for us including 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; Yvonne Lee, who won an Emmy for her work covering September 11 for CNN, and Tom Regan who is the past president of the Online News Association, former front page editor of the Boston Globe’s Web site, and currently head of NPRs News Blog. I previously worked as the strategic advisor and coach of Google’s Vice-president of Sales, their International Sales Director and numerous others there, and left that to start this public interest non-profit organization.

We’ve developed the site using Ruby on Rails, MySQL, and a good amount of AJAX. We already have a full back-end and a user-friendly front end, and are going to improve and develop it even further.

Another site we are in the early stages of starting is:

http://www.leastof.org/

Check out the innovative World Wealth Calculator on the front page that the top economist at the World Bank helped us create. Here is more information about this project -

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

INFORMATION WE NEED:

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

* Your resume (or the equivalent information such as work experience and skills)
* Some links to work you’ve done (sites, applications, code, etc.) and a description of your role in them. Attachments of code are fine too.
* The number of hours per week you are available
* How much you would charge per hour to work on these projects. Again, we are a nonprofit and do not have a large budget.
* 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 flexible, though finding times 2-4 days a week to talk briefly via phone and/or IM will be important (we can talk via Skype if preferred).

We are looking for 10-40 hours per week.

The types of things we need done are -

* Improving functionality and details of existing areas of the site - most of which are in the back-end content management system we developed.
* Making sure the site runs smoothly on our host, some systems admin work and occasional (about once a week) technical support mostly through email for our editors and sometimes for our readers.
* Fixing bugs
* Adding new features and functionality to the site

If you are stronger in some areas, but not in others, it could still work out as we could possibly have two part-time developers.

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,

Peter

REQUIREMENTS:

The basic skills requirements are:

* Rails and Ruby
* XHTML/CSS (not necessarily design).
* MySQL
* Comfortable with Linux, Apache, FastCGI
* Familiarity with tools such as SVN and Trac is helpful, though these are pretty easy to figure out.
* We don’t need graphic design as we already have the look and feel of the whole site, but ability to implement additional pages using the same look and feel as other pages on the site.

Other important skills:

* Ability to take specs and turn them into functional features
* Ability to be organized, keep a list of things you’re working on and keep track of time spent on work items
* Understanding how different parts of a system effect each other
* Ability to communicate on a regular basis
* Ability to be productive and follow-through
* Paying attention to details and thoroughness

Further details

City / state:Telecommuting / virtual Country:United States How to apply:See section called "Information we need" in the description Tags: Rails, ruby, AJAX, developer, programmer, Telecommute, Telecommuting, Virtual, ror, ruby on rails