Due to the COVID-19 outbreak and the recommendations by the South African government, this year’s do_action event will be 100% remote and online.
The WordPress South Africa community is a network of developers, designers and website builders who believe that WordPress is the perfect platform for any organisation to use to build their online presence effectively. For the last six years, our community has hosted the do_action WordPress Charity Hackathon in Cape Town where we have spent a full day building brand new websites for a selection of local charities and NGOs. This year, for the seventh annual do_action event, we are going to be repeating this for a completely new set of 10 charitable organisations and we’re going to be taking it national!
Who can participate?
In order to bring these websites to life, we are looking for volunteers from all over the country to be Project Managers, Developers, Designers, Social Media Managers, Content Managers, and Quality Assurance Testers to work with each non-profit organisation. You can sign up below! You can select the organisation you would like to work with and then select your role on the team – this way you will know what you will be doing when the event kicks off. Project Managers will receive the contact details of their chosen non-profit as well as the other participants on their team so that they can make preliminary plans with everyone before the event starts.
How will the event work?
During the event, you will work together with your team to build a fresh online presence for your selected non-profit organisation and the websites will be hosted for free (for life) by xneelo.
As this is the first time we will be running this event online we are still ironing out the details, but the expected plan is to use four weeks as do_action weeks in South Africa, starting on 1 June 2020. During that time, the teams working on the websites will be meeting on our community Slack group to make plans and do their work. The plan will be as follows:
- Each team will have 1 week (Monday to Sunday) to work on the websites together, with 5 teams working each week (so the whole event will take place over a 2 week period).
- We will start the week off with a group video call for everyone taking part, then you can break off into separate “rooms” and plan your week together – you will be able to communicate in your team’s dedicated video room, as well as a Slack channel just for your team.
- As a team, you will plan your schedule for the week together, and can even work asynchronously if you wish.
You can use any online tools you like to track your work together as a team, and if there are any premium online services you think would be valuable then please let us know and we can reach out for sponsorship funds to cover those costs.
You can find a whole bunch of additional information in our detailed event FAQ.