Community Tech Lab pairs community organisations in the Queenstown Lakes district with local software engineers who build them something useful.
The district has great software engineers and community organisations, and they rarely get to work together. Three organisations are chosen through an open application process and matched with a small team of local software engineers each. Over five weeks of weekly sprints, each team builds one solution, then hands it over with training, written instructions and six weeks of free bug fixes.
For software engineers, it is paid contract work on real projects with real users, mentoring from experienced local engineers, and code you can point at. The pay is a community rate, well under commercial rates.
For community organisations, it costs nothing. The ask is one named contact and roughly one to two hours a week during the build.
Everything we build is open source under the MIT License, and each solution is scoped to serve more than one organisation, so others in the district can reuse it.
Community Tech Lab is a Startup Queenstown Lakes programme, delivered with Queenstown Coders Connect, FLINT Queenstown, Queenstown Resort College, huddl and Technology Queenstown, and funded by the Queenstown Lakes District Council Economic Diversification Fund.