Location: Remote or in Sierra Leone

Job Category: IT & Telecoms

Work Type: Data sourcing, scraping, cleaning, compilation, and visualising.

Reports To: Programme Lead, Code for Sierra Leone

Job Description

Code for Sierra Leone is an all-inclusive, citizen led grass root community that aims to leverage the power of open source technologies to bring innovations in the public sector in Sierra Leone.

Earlier this year, we organised Sierra Leone’s first ever data bootcamp in collaboration with Code for Africa, the World Bank and other partners (http://freetown.dbootcamp.org). The aim of this bootcamp was to bring together coders, journalists, civil society advocates and policymakers to work on projects that use government data and open source tools to develop applications that aim to improve the delivery of services in the public sector. We selected the following 5 teams as finalists from the d|Bootcamp:

• Memba-O! aims to act as a parliamentary watchdog, enabling citizens to track the voting records of parliamentarians via a web application.

• mWash will use a mobile application to map all public water points in the country and create a community platform for reporting and tracking of contaminated water sites.

• Mbate Konli (Solve Cholera) is looking to build an SMS application that would provide cholera sensitization messages to the users in an intuitive manner.

• Hazard Map will map all disaster prone areas in Freetown, in order to provide an effective way for the government to assist the residents in these areas.

We are now incubating these teams and guiding them on building their project ideas into prototypes.

Code for Sierra Leone is looking to engage an software engineer who will be helping these teams work on the technical aspects of their solutions. This fellowship provides a brilliant opportunity to work on a number of open source projects in the civic tech space, as well as to gain solid experience of launching projects in a technologically challenging environment.

The developer fellow must have strong full-stack web development skills, and should be someone who is motivated to combine the art of design with the art of programming. Responsibilities will include translation of the UI/UX design wireframes to actual code that will produce visual elements of the application. You will also be responsible for translating the use cases and requirements of the projects into functionalities on the applications

Responsibilities:

• Develop new user-facing features
• Build reusable code and libraries for future use
• Ensure the technical feasibility of UI/UX designs
• Optimize application for maximum speed and scalability
• Collaborate with other team members and stakeholders
• Select the specific tools, libraries and frameworks to be used for all projects
• Ensure that all projects follow the project deliverable timelines

Qualifications:

• Proficient understanding of web markup, including HTML5, CSS3
• Basic understanding of server-side CSS pre-processing platforms, such as LESS and SASS
• Proficient understanding of client-side scripting and JavaScript frameworks, including jQuery
• Proficient understanding of cross-browser compatibility issues and ways to work around them.
• Proficient knowledge of a back-end programming language, preferably either PHP, Python, Node.JS, Ruby or PHP
• Integration of multiple data sources and databases into one system
• Management of hosting environment, including database administration and scaling an application to support load changes
• Setup and administration of backups
• User authentication and authorization between multiple systems, servers, and environments
• Proficient understanding of code versioning tools, such as Git
• Proficiency in mapping and visualisation tools, such as Google Fusion tables, Carto, Infogram
• Proficiency in tools used for creating SMS based applications, such as TextIt, Twilio.

Reporting To:

The Innovation Fellow would be working with and reporting to the Code for Sierra Leone Project Manager

Placement and Duration:

The Innovation Fellow will be based remotely or in Sierra Leone. The position reports directly to the Programme Lead, Code for Sierra Leone. The fellowship would run for a maximum of 3 months with the opportunity for extension on other programmes or projects.

How To Apply:

Please apply by sending an email to fellowship@codeforsierraleone.org with a compelling case or a list of projects that you have done already, and or links to your Github profile before January 5, 2017. Please include on the subject line: Innovation Fellow: Code For Sierra Leone. If you do not hear from us within 2 weeks following the application deadline please consider your application unsuccessful.

—–

ABOUT US:

Code for Africa (CfAfrica) is the continent’s largest independent open data and civic technology initiative. We seek to build digital democracies that give citizens timely and unfettered access to actionable information that empowers them to make informed decisions and that strengthens civic engagement for improved public governance and accountability.

CfAfrica operates as a federation of autonomous country-based digital innovation organisations that support ‘citizen labs’ in nine countries and major projects in a further 15 countries. There are CfAfrica affiliate labs in Cameroon, Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, South Africa, Tanzania, and Uganda. CfAfrica runs Africa’s OpenGov Fellowships and also embeds Innovation Fellows into newsrooms and social justice organisations to help liberate data of public interest, or to build tools that help empower citizens.

In addition to fellowships and citizen labs, CfAfrica runs the $1 million per year #innovateAFRICA fund plus the $500,000/year #impactAFRICA fund and the $500,000/year Sandbox Fund which all award seed grants to civic pioneers for experiments with everything from camera drones and environmental sensors, to encryption for whistleblowers and data-driven semantic analysis tools for investigative watchdogs.

CfAfrica also curates continental resources such as the africanSPENDING portal of budget transparency resources, the openAFRICA data portal, the sourceAFRICA document repository, and the connectedAFRICA transparency toolkit for tracking the often hidden social networks and economic interests in politics. CfAfrica is furthermore custodian of the continental 30,000 strong Hacks/Hackers community, and incubates the continent’s largest investigative journalism initiative, the African Network of Centers for Investigating Reporting (which spearheaded the #PanamaPapers investigations on the continent).