Group: FSF:Tech Team Volunteers
This page is linked from https://www.fsf.org/volunteer.
The FSF tech team could really use some help from some skilled hackers!
Contents
What makes a good volunteer
- You run GNU/Linux on your personal computer.
- You know the command line.
- You know some basics of GNU/Linux server administration.
- You can create a virtual machine on a computer you own with virt-manager or virsh and expose a port to the internet.
- You know how to use git.
- You can write technical documentation.
- You are comfortable communicating on mumble and IRC (we also have room in our Boston office).
- You have at least a few hours to spend.
How to volunteer
- Join irc: https://libera.chat, channel #fsfsys and say you are interested. You can use to get the last 24-48 hours of chat history, just say "fsysbot catch me up" in #fsfsys. NOTE: This not a public log, but we assume you know that anyone can join and request the last 24-48 hours of logs which are shared only to that person and that sharing does not imply permission to reshare the log. More info on logging is at https://libera.chat/policies/ .
It it also helpful to email sysadmin@fsf.org and tell us:
- Things you are interested in working on (see project ideas below).
- Overview of skills you have.
- How much time you estimate you have.
The tech team or other volunteers will reply.
Examples of ways to contribute
There are many more possibilities, this is just some of the more obvious things.
Core FSF work that needs lots of collaboration with the tech team
- Upgrade the operating system on one of our virtual machines. Document and fix various issues that come up.
- Help create the new FSF forge: https://www.fsf.org/blogs/sysadmin/coming-soon-a-new-site-for-fully-free-collaboration .
Work that can be done more independently
- Write public documentation on FSF & GNU run services, software, machines, network, etc.
- Help make an FSF-run web site available as a Tor hidden service.
- Improve edward GPG bot ( https://emailselfdefense.fsf.org/en/ )
- Upgrade to support newer ciphers
- Improve general usability and use cases (e.g. autocrypt).
- Improve JShelter, LibreJS, or H-Node.
- Improve the FSF History page https://www.fsf.org/history/. Right now it is just HTML and CSS, it needs to become generated from markdown, be in it, have translations ((We have a list of a few other things).
- If you have significant security experience, there might be some specific work to help secure FSF run systems. In that case, please send a detailed resume to sysadmin@fsf.org.
About the FSF tech team
The FSF tech team is currently just Michael and Ian https://www.fsf.org/about/staff-and-board. We (the tech team) are able to give roughly daily assistance to volunteers, but we have to be careful that the time helping a volunteer leads to more work being done than doing the work ourselves. In the past few years, two big projects we've announced plans for, the FSF forge and the FSF website remake have slipped as other work has taken priority. In 2022, we started to work on more general volunteer onboarding and outreach. We want your help!
Another relevant page for volunteers: Group:FSF:Tech_Team_Volunteer_Handbook
FAQ
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