Crowd ops is an open source project that promotes effort contributions to companies you believe in or like who need could benefit from DevOps tech and concepts.
The idea is simple:
1) Companies have or rely on tech to accomplish their goals
2) Companies either sign up OR are recommended for crowd ops
3) If you're an engineer, you can specify your skill set or if you're a company, a tech stack.
4) Wherever companies and engineers intersect, we have a match.
5) A dialogue opens up between company and engineer.
6) Both parties understand the work is volunteer and MUST agree on support and maintenance.
Some guidelines:
For Engineers:
1) Leave the company you're volunteering for with a low risk, low maintance solution.
2) Know the tech stack well enough that the what you've put in place allows you to sleep at night.
3) Keep costs low, open source where you can
4) The GitHub repository for each company is a good place to help you decide where you want/can contribute
For Companies:
1) Explain your challenges from first person. This makes for a better 'user story' for the engineers and is easier to solve.
2) The solutions you receive should solve at least 80% of the challenge it addresses.
3) Some problems cannot be solved, some require a full time engineer.
An example:
The problem:
My friend started a solar company for low income residential areas. He manually used social media data find areas of interest, thinking bigger, he copy pasted a Python script off StackOverflow to sort of automate this process. He's got a budget but not enough for an ops team, developers or experience about how to do "make it work."
Solution:
He shows good intitiative, using StackOverflow to find code to sovle an ops related problem and he's got a noble cause. You, Engineer X, understanding the problem, the nature of how scripts get deployed and written help this guy run this script reliably, efficiently and inexpensively enough for him to afford and get the most utility out of it.
Another example:
The problem:
(Lets make it difficult)
Same problem as above, except there are some full time developers involved and theres a cloud provider involved. But you don't know about the social media platform or Python.
The solution:
You have experience engineering within the cloud provider's services so you contribute maybe some Terraform or other infra/config as code to the repository and its protable enough for someone to interface with it easily.
Now Solar guy is happy, you're a contributer and the world is being saved. Cool bruh.