Pariyatti has recently begun an effort to build an open source mobile app. The goal is to help a greater number of people reach Pariyatti's large stock of resources.
Although Pariyatti does have some full-time and part-time staff, the effort to create a complete digital library and mobile app will require volunteers. Free Software (Open Source) built by Pariyatti will operate somewhat differently than the open source projects many of us are accustomed to. As such, it may be beneficial for contributors to have meditation experience and/or a scholarly interest in ancient Pāli texts.
For more information on these differences, please read Pariyatti's Contribution Guidelines
Yes! Our team is looking for people in the community interested in "Digital Dhamma Service": contributing with their specific skill-set for the good of others.
There are two broad groups to consider:
(1) BAs, Designers, Engineers, QAs, Ops, and Project Managers
(2) Meditators and Pāli Scholars
Those interested in contributing to Pariyatti Open Source would ideally fit in the intersection between these two groups. "Meditators" is intentionally vague. The project has thus far had contributions from serious meditators who have taken long courses on one end of the spectrum --- and new meditators who have only taken one or two courses, on the other. "Engineers" is also intentionally vague. We have had contributions from developers with decades of experience and contributions from folks just beginning their programming careers.
These are guidelines. Pariyatti projects intend to be inclusive and contributions won't be restricted to any particular set of criteria.
There are four styles of contribution available:
(1) Pariyatti staff (inherently long-term)
(2) Long-term volunteers
(3) Medium-term volunteers
(4) Burst / patch volunteers
Pariyatti staff will maintain control of project scope and direction. Because Pariyatti projects are multi-decade, it will be important that long-term contributors are available from the Pariyatti organization.
Long-term volunteers are people who are certain they would like to be a part of the project for an extended period of time (multiple years). Those of us in long-term service are listed on a roster (this is not public, due to privacy concerns). The roster is just a contact sheet that contains an individual's skills, availability, and contact information so they can be notified when an upcoming project could use their help.
Medium-term volunteers are people who have a fixed timeline for contributing. Perhaps you are between jobs. Perhaps you have taken a year off of work to serve and meditate. Perhaps you are on vacation. Whatever the reason, medium-term volunteers can contribute by working full-time on a project or by picking up an atomic task and delivering it over the course of their fixed timeline. A concrete example of this was the ReactNative spike for the mobile app.
Burst / patch volunteers are folks with a weekend to spare and a quick contribution they'd like to make. These contributions might follow the standard open source model: a bugfix or small feature enhancement in the form of a Pull Request.
Of course, it's possible your contributions might fit into multiple categories. For example, you may want us to list you on the roster as a Burst Volunteer who is only available on weekends.
At the moment, our biggest constraint is active development and operations. If you are familiar with Dart/Flutter (or mobile app development in general) or if you are familiar with Ruby/Rails/neo4j, you could be immediately productive. Even if you aren't familiar with these tech stacks at all, if you have a lot of software development experience they will be relatively easy to learn. We aren't wedded to any one programming language or technology stack and we invite suggestions for alternatives. However, please take all the considerations listed in the Contribution Guidelines into account before raising your suggestion. If you would like to contribute with Ops, some familiarity with distribution through the App/Play Stores, Rails, and/or neo4j would be an asset.
We are currently a completely remote team with contributors in the USA, India, the UK, and Canada. We are using Asana to track tasks and Telegram for team chat. Active development has a standup meeting every morning (IST) and individual contributors are welcome to sign up for whatever work they feel equipped to complete.
Please get in touch with me (Steven Deobald) and I'll be happy to answer additional questions or start discussing how you can contribute!