Thank you for your offer of help and support. We get a lot of emails from IT folks offering to help, particularly folks with development experience. While we appreciate it, our website is not terribly complicated but is incredibly specific to our organization. To effectively play in that space, someone needs to be both a master of our technology stack AND have a detailed and nuanced understanding of the interplay between volunteer needs, user behaviors, and how the backend systems sync and impact each other.

One example is the Route/Place called Leavenworth ( https://www.mountaineers.org/activities/routes-places/leavenworth ). This is a climbing destination used to approximate all the climbing walls in Leavenworth. Does that nomenclature make any sense? Absolutely not! However, it’s how we’ve always used it, and if we were to change the name it would have significant downstream impacts on other routes/places, for our climbing committees, and for our permitting requirements (among others). This is an example of something that someone might see and say, “hey, this makes no sense, let’s improve it!”, without knowing the full context. For that reason, we have chosen to hire staff to run our IT needs even though we have volunteers who could do it, just as we have chosen to hire a CEO even though we have volunteers with executive leadership experience.

We also discussed the idea of giving a technology committee access to our GitHub and/or developers to support development, or find another way to get volunteers involved “since their time is free”. As the person who has been the go-between with our developers and staff right now, I can tell you, managing the project is a full-time job, and we don’t have staff capacity to manage a larger team of volunteers for this. We did try this approach in the beginning (2014 when we launched with a technology committee). But, as sometimes happens with committees, it was not ultimately successful and was disbanded by the committee’s choice.

One last piece of info: we currently have a contract for 20 hours/month with our developer team, Jazkarta. That is to fix bugs and implement small improvements as possible. Then, for this fiscal year, we contracted eight iterations of work at the price of $10k/iteration. Each iteration completes about 20-30 hours worth of work, and that’s how we’re able to do the bigger tech improvements. We recently launched the result of two iterations, Tech Update 4.5 ( https://www.mountaineers.org/blog/tech-update-4-5-bulk-roster-updates-practice-sessions-site-search-and-more ).

For these reasons, and more, we will not be offering access to our technology stack to volunteers.