"Elixir for Good" community?

welcome @taylordowns2000, great to see you out here and super glad to hear that another tech non-profit is using Elixir also. We’ve been using Elixir for Glific (https://glific.org/) since our beginning and are super pleased with the architecture, design and performance as we serve an increasing number of NGOs, primarily in India, but hopefully going globally soon.

We are also open source and a DPG

Great job Taylor, congrats!

Not sure what happened to the original E4G initiative but if you’ve got the time and think you can get others to help, maybe approach the EEF to see if it’s something they can help or get involved with?

The EEF was only a year or so old when this thread was posted so they might have more capacity for something like this now, plus they’re already experienced in the space being a not for profit themselves.

On a separate (and non-technical point) advances in Nx has rekindled my interest in a project where we raise a million pounds for animal welfare charities, so I’d be interested in hearing how everyone else approaches setting up similar projects from an organisational and operating standpoint

Hey folks, sorry to be late to the party here. Since 2014, I’ve been running a small organization (OpenFn.org) that serves NGOs and low-to-middle-income country governments. We provide them with a workflow automation platform built on Elixir (modern Phoenix LiveView, actually!) and our main application is now fully open source. We’re an accredited “digital public good”, a verified “global good for health”, and have used Elixir to provide critical services to some of the world’s most vulnerable people in 40+ countries around the world.

Check out the repo: GitHub - OpenFn/lightning: Lightning ⚡️ is latest version of the OpenFn platform, a DPG and DPI building block that governments use to manage complex service/workflow automation and data integration projects. · GitHub

I’m not on Discourse, but I’m wondering what’s the best way to engage with this Elixir For Good community? Another slight wrinkle is that we’re in the process of incorporating as a “public benefit corporation”; we’re not a 501(c)3 non-profit. Instead, we have a sustainable but “greed-proof” business model and seek to grow our social impact by delivering our software to more (and more impactful) governments and NGOs at a low cost. Currently, we couldn’t provide donation certificates for individuals hoping to get tax deductions, but we have considered opening up a non-profit that could hold our Elixir IP, receive donations, and provide volunteer contributors with the ability to apply for tax deductions as they work.

If anyone has opinions about how this might work, if you all have made progress on the Elixir for Good concept since 2021, or if you’re keen on getting involved, please let me know how to engage!

P.S., I feel silly for not thinking of looking here before. We’ve been using Elixir “for good” for so long now—as well as driving forward the general “tech for good” and digital public goods space—and I’m absolutely thrilled to see that there’s interest from this forum in the broader mission. @PJUllrich , thanks so much for pointing me to this thread.

Glific’s philosophy is similar to Proca, and we’ve worked with one of the Proca founders (Xavier D) in previous social impact projects.

One of our funders, Omidyar Network India, just posted as to their thinking and reasoning behind supporting projects like Glific and Tech4Dev, you can read it here:

Please feel free to like and comment for bigger and broader reach

Thanks! That got me in.

I think the old invite link expired (it does this by default).

Here is a new link which explicitly doesn’t expire:

Hi @johnhitz , neither! Or at least, to the very best of my knowledge. @wolf4earth has kindly been helping in setting up the Discord server - this is an ongoing process - and last time we spoke, things were working fine. I’ve lodged a detailed support request with Discord, who have proven to be pretty quick on the turnaround and helpful too, so I expect we’ll have this resolved soon.

I tried to join the Discord server via the link you posted last week. It says “Invite Invalid.” Do you have a new link or did you move the channel?

Hello,

Yes, Proca is a drop-in element but also a building block of tools for organisations, informal groups and communities to engage their members in online action.

An action tool cycle is this:

• present a relevant online action to people who care about something
• facilitate the action
• perhaps collect action data and/or member email/phone to get back to them

There is some abstractions and heavy lifting here that every action tool should implement - Proca is a toolbox that packages these mechanisms and complexities, so you don’t have to reinvent the wheel.

For example: how to handle scale (wave of interest after viral social media video), privacy/GDPR, member action screening, sync to CRM, collect donations via Stripe/PayPal, sending thank you email in the right language when your audience is multilingual and many similar details.

Proca is Free Software - so an organisation can host their server, or Elixir for Good can, or if neither want to bear the maintenance cost, we do suck paid hosting (this being our business model).

• Website: https://proca.app
• ExDoc: https://docs.proca.app (need some care definitely)

Last but not least: Proca is not meant to fill every need. For example, if a group needs a survey on their website, then maybe it’s better to embed Typeform, as they have really beautiful and polished surveys

HI Marcin,
I wonder if there’s any possible application for Proca in assisting Developers for Good itself? And is it open-source? Perhaps this warrants a discussion…