Job opening for documentation writer on ODK

Apr 11, 2017

This position has been filled. Thanks to everyone who applied!

ODK provides free and open source tools for social good organizations to collect data quickly, accurately, offline, and at scale. ODK has been used to collect billions of data points around the world. Example projects include gathering real-time election data in emerging democracies, forest monitoring in Indonesia, and tracking polio vaccinations in the Middle East.

ODK's design enables novice users to collect data in challenging environments and its robustness in these environments has driven the platform's adoption and evolution. Additionally, building an open source community around ODK has allowed it to benefit from code and content contributions from users, implementers, and developers.

Nafundi is a company started by founders of ODK that offers professional services and software customization for ODK tools. We are seeking a strong writer to help document usage of the ODK tools for both technical and non-technical end-users, integrating user feedback from support questions to improve content. We're also looking for end-user documentation support for new feature launches. The ideal candidate has written end-user documentation for software and is familiar with and passionate about open source.

Responsibilities include:

• Answer support questions on the ODK Community list to get to know the software and the community
• Identify the best tools and platforms for ODK documentation and support
• Create non-technical user documentation for ODK Collect and ODK Briefcase
• Create technical user documentation for building forms with XLSForm
• Write release notes and announcements for new features and large deployments

Minimum qualifications:

• Writing samples in English, preferably software documentation
• Demonstrated ability to effectively communicate software concepts to a non-technical audience
• Demonstrated ability to self-motivate (e.g., a side project)
• Knowledge of web development and content management tools (e.g., Wordpress, GitHub Pages, Markdown, HTML)

Preferred qualifications:

• Experience using and documenting open source projects
• Experience planning and implementing strategies to improve community documentation
• Experience working remotely and with globally distributed teams
• Experience developing on or deploying mobile data collection (e.g., iFormBuilder, Pendragon Forms, CommCare, SurveyCTO, Magpi, Fulcrum)

What we offer:

• A chance to contribute to a project with broad social impact
• A distributed, open, and fun community eager for great documentation
• Location independence
• Flexible contract-based arrangement

Contract rate and length are negotiable based on experience. If this sounds like a good fit, please send a cover letter, your resume, and 3-5 writing samples to jobs@nafundi.com with subject "Documentation Writer for ODK".

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