I’m a CS student, I have some time before I graduate and have kind of dipped my toes in various things without specializing in anything. I would like to know what would be useful for the movement, so that I can use my skills to contribute.
And before people say “everything is useful”…well yeah but it’s nice and fulfilling to have specific ideas I can work on learning/building myself.
Also where can I find leftist open source projects? I know lemmy and this website for one are open source but not sure of others.
No tech project is going to build socialism. Many Occupy Wall street era people tried it and it went no where. That said, in the course of building a socialist movement IRL, you’ll find having tech skills are occaisonally useful, either to have an online presence like a website or to automate tedious computer work.
- deploy a static site with github or gitlab pages
- DNS management.
- manage a linux cloud VM. ssh and bash etc.
- deploy services to a VM with docker-compose. Eg self host wordpress
- Processing datasets like membership lists. VBA, python, R etc.
- web scraping whatever data you’ll need.
I cannot emphasize this enough, the less code the better. Keep project small and tight. Try to leverage existing functionality as much as possible.
social engineering to scam bitcoin from tech bros :kim-peace:
Cryptography and networking to securely communicate during organization and monitor suspicious traffic
General OSINT skills to vet people and provide proof of any claims
Not a CS skill, but common in security work is social engineering, and hell, maybe even a little bit of journalism/blogging. Build up a reputation of some sort and attempt to find sympathetic/disillusioned sources who might expose some stuff that will help protestors/organizers
Web design/UX maybe? These days a lot of people are used to or drawn to “modern” and “sleek” designs. Marxists.org will likely deter new people lol
The first two will probably be the most “useful,” but as others have stated, it’s mostly a lucrative field to make a bunch of money
However, if you want to benefit people (which won’t necessarily further any socialist cause), you can get a job at a public organization such as hospitals and schools. Some libraries are large and popular enough to warrant in house IT staff.
Sysadmin shit, to host independent communities and servers. Not cloud BS, hosting on dedicated servers instead - from at least slightly more censorship-resistant hosts - or even home servers (greater legal risk), and load-balancing properly. High level (as in: removed from the math, not “advanced” - just get a handle on what’s secure) encryption stuff, to implement secure communication that does not rely on an easy common target (custom apps potentially, including mobile apps for the zoomers - even if they’re mostly just a chat frondend to GPG; I recommend user-enabled NFC key sharing if you go this route - tap a few buttons, put your smartphone against a comrade’s phone, boom, trusted key exchange - do not trust smartphones for anything too critical though, and the same applies to windows computers or linux ones without proper full-disk encryption). Webshit stuff, to publish content and try and inform people (though mind you on that one wordpress would almost universally do the job). Cybersecurity stuff, finally, for data extraction and hacktivism and the like - auditing code (or fuzztesting proprietary binaries) for flaws; not publishing them straight out and exploiting them to disrupt shit or at the very least diffuse a message.