Boosting the signal: OTW seeks XHTML/CSS coders

The Organization for Transformative Works, who run Archive Of Our Own, a fan fiction archive and (so far) 100%-female open source project, are seeking experienced XHTML/CSS coders for frontend development work. They’ve posted a job ad on their blog.

We’re now much further forward with the Archive, and we’re badly in need of some front end skillz! The illustrious lim wrote the main style sheets for the Archive, but now that those are in place, we have many other front end jobs. The lovely Flamebyrd has been doing sterling work on some of these, and we’re jazzed about the fact that Hope recently joined us to work on skins for the Archive, but there’s a lot of work to do and we’ve yet to perfect our cloning technology. So, we’re looking for people to work on some of the following:

• Reviewing the design of the site for accessibility and making improvements as necessary. We already know we have some issues in this area, particularly when it comes to ease of enlarging text, and we really want to get it right.
• Reviewing our coding standards and making sure that we have fully standards compliant code.
• Implementing cross-browser compatibility for the site, which is currently only Firefox compatible.
• Finetuning the styling for different parts of the Archive, especially in areas which have been built since the main body of work was done on the CSS.
• Lots of other smaller jobs – you can see some of these in our list of current frontend issues.

It’s interesting that the OTW’s project style is more formal than most open source projects. They post job ads when they’re looking for talent, hold meetings and take minutes, and I’ve even seen org charts explaining the different groups within the project and how they interact. This is not really my scene, but many of the AO3 coders seem to be thriving on it, and they’ve managed to build an active project with dozens of contributors, many of whom have never contributed to open source projects before.

Although the job ad says they’re looking for experience people, the AO3 project has also been great at training people up from scratch. If you’ve been wanting to learn frontend web development stuff in a supportive environment, this might be a great opportunity for you.