The MIT Center for Civic Media is looking for a contract developer to help us design a web-based tool that empowers community organizers around the world to create crowd-sourced monitoring campaigns that hold officials accountable to the public promises they make. We are looking for a Boston area developer that can sit in our offices and work closely with us for a period of 3 months. We’d like to start as soon as possible this summer. The first month and a half of development is reasonably well outlined, but the rest of the time will depend on feedback from user testing, user studies, and more of your input. There may be an opportunity for the work to continue after that, depending on performance and funding.

The primary focus will be on developing an interaction-heavy web-app. We expect to build things with Ruby on Rails, lots of Javascript, HTML and CSS. Our work leverages and builds on the open-source Open Data Kit project, so we plan on contributing things back to that community and having greater impact. We want to build user-friendly and intuitive websites, so familiarity and appreciation of good design is required.

You’ll work closely with a team of designers, organizers, and developers in our research group already working on this Civic Tech project, which is why we want you to sit next to us here at our offices at the MIT Media Lab in Cambridge, MA. We will need to iterate quickly, and will probably rely on some test-driven development approaches. We’ve also been closely collaborating with two communities in Brazil on this project, and have visited them to do some collaborative design sessions already. There will be an opportunity to travel to Brazil to work with these partners. If have international experience, or you speak Portuguese, that would be a plus.

Email your cover letter, resume, portfolio to civic-ptdev@media.mit.edu.