New Public (https://newpublic.org) | Open Source Developer | REMOTE | Full time $140-$160k

About New Public

We’re a nonprofit R&D lab that creates online spaces that serve society and create bridges across social fault lines. We believe that thriving societies require flourishing public spaces, and that the design of public spaces shapes the kind of public conversations and communities that a society has.

Our work started when co-founders Eli Pariser and Talia Stroud asked what healthy societies need from digital spaces — not just in terms of avoiding harms, but in terms of creating public goods.

One of our flagship projects is the Public Spaces Incubator (PSI), where we are working together with a consortium of public broadcasters around the world to build new social tools that are publicly owned and serve the public interest.

Learn more about the philosophy of this project project here and discover more about our approach and early co-designed prototypes here.

About the Role

We are seeking an Open Source Developer to join our Public Spaces Incubator (PSI)! In this role you will empower an international community of developers to extend and integrate the PSI platform.

Alongside a consortium of pioneering public media organizations, we’ve built a highly modular conversation system that makes it easy to add new features or to integrate with existing products.

In the near term, our goal is for product teams at each member organization to feel able to make meaningful contributions to the PSI toolkit. In the medium term, our goal is to open source, and to grow this community of contributors and implementers so that anyone who has good ideas about how to make conversations healthier will be able to implement them on top of this platform. You will play a primary role in making these things happen.

As Open Source Developer, you will build relationships with and multiply the impact of public-spirited designers and developers around the world by leading code reviews and important refactors of the code base, mentoring and onboarding new contributors, and supporting a broader program transformation from experimental toolkit to intuitive open source platform.

Key Responsibilities

• Oversee code quality, including reviewing pull requests from external partners, collaborating with contributors to make edits, and performing code cleanups and refactorings,
• Create documentation around the codebase and its use, including codelabs and video tutorials that clearly and effectively explain how to use the system and maintaining the PSI website.
• Spearhead onboarding by mentoring and training new developers, traveling to partner sites to assist with onboarding, and building tools that enable smooth integration of the PSI system.
• Triage and comment on issues submitted to online forums, and run external forums (likely on github discussions).
• Represent New_ Public by attending and/or speaking at in-person events and monitoring relevant online forums to talk about PSI.
• Interface between the New_ Public team and outside contributors, keeping the core team informed about any challenges that external partners are facing and escalating high priority issues as needed.