Volunteer
Help Grow the KCDC Website
We’re looking for people who want to play with a project that brings together peer education, technology, and place.
You might know Knowledge Commons DC as a free school, an organization that enables you to take (or teach!) classes on topics both practical and fanciful. You could also think of KCDC as a laboratory, an experiment in using Internet systems to strengthen real-life connections. We’re not a sprawling MOOC, though we find them fascinating. We’re local, proudly scrappy and homegrown, and rooted in D.C.
We’ve settled into a rhythm, one session every four months. We’re getting good at running a free school. We’re surprised at the figures: we’ve offered about 250 classes in just under two years, helping 200 instructors to reach 2,500 students.
Our website makes all of this possible. We’ve built our own software to handle student communication, registration, and coordination. (We work in Django. See our code on GitHub.) In a sense, the Internet is our our student union, library, and registrar’s office all in one. We’re building systems that have an immediate value: they let us offer stronger programs, right here in D.C.
We want to do more
Now that we’ve got the project running and growing, we want to do more.
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We want to expand the role of mapping and visualization. Our sessions spread out across the city, and we want to do more to help people understand the way that this school uses space. We want to gain insight into who’s taking our classes.
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We need to explain our idea and document our programs better. There are dozens of stories coming out of our sessions, and we should tell them.
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KCDC exists, in part, to connect people who share curiosities and concerns. This January, we helped students to create their own Citizen Circles as a way to continue their studies. We can do much more.
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Last, we want to smooth the regular operations of our virtual school. We’d like to offer a polished, bulletproof experience for students and teachers.
That’s where you come in!
That’s why we want your help, developers and tinkerers and artists. There are all kinds of volunteer roles, but in order to explore these software-related ideas, we’re looking for people with some specialized skills:
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Django/Python developers.
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Front-end web developers and designers, especially ones with JavaScript, SASS, and visualization chops.
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People who can tell stories about this project, in words, pictures, and video.
We’ve got expertise in these areas, but we need more people and more ideas. You’d be joining a team of multitalented people. We’re fascinated by education, learning, and community-building. We can build a popup school in a weekend, and make the activity fun. Somehow, we manage all this by consensus. And we’re all working out of love.
Also, we feed people.
Get in touch. knowledgecommonsdc@gmail.com
David Ramos is a designer, developer, and design educator. He works on projects that support entrepreneurs, advocates, environmentalists, and journalists. His professional practice encompasses interaction design, web application development, cartography, and information design. He teaches at American University, offering classes that integrate culture, code, and form. David is interested in landscape history and ways of interpreting the places that surround us.