Harvard Library Innovation Lab | Web Developer | Cambridge, MA | Onsite, Full-time
The Harvard Library Innovation Lab is hiring a lead developer for opencasebook.org, our free, Creative-Commons-licensed legal textbook publishing platform.
About the project: opencasebook.org democratizes access to legal education by replacing $200 textbooks with free, forkable, digital or print-on-demand alternatives. We’re used in law classes at Harvard Law School and elsewhere; our website and code are open and available to anyone in the world. We’ve saved students over $1 million in textbook costs and have the potential for orders of magnitude more.
About the team: LIL is a group of ~10 developers/designers/lawyers/librarians building projects for systemic change, based out of the Harvard Law School Library. Our other projects include case.law, an open database of 360 years of precedential American caselaw; perma.cc, which fights link rot in court decisions and law review articles; and the Nuremberg Project, digitizing one of only two copies of the full evidence record from the WW2 Nuremberg trials. We’ve done side projects on distributed encryption, crowd-sourced fair use advice, interactive art installations, and more.
About you: this is a great fit for a more experienced developer (like me!) who is looking for a low-stress job with high social impact and great opportunities for personal growth. We use Django and Vue, so you should either have experience with those or with getting up to speed on new things. We are a very small team, so you should be prepared to contribute across the stack and to be very self-directed about what you work on day to day.
Personal opportunities: Another programmer here recently described this as the “most human” place she ever worked, and I feel the same way — we’re a small group from a lot of different backgrounds with wide scope to do creative work, so we place a lot of emphasis on making sure everyone has what they need while they’re working here. We each have real support to pursue experiments drawing on our own experience and enthusiasm, whether that’s exploring side projects, taking classes at Harvard, teaching classes at Harvard, making art projects, organizing conferences, advocacy, etc. Many of us have done more than one of these, and we’re serious about maintaining both a work/life balance and an exploration/exploitation balance within our work.
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(This is a weird one! There aren't many programming jobs, even academic jobs, that pay a steady salary to creatively pursue social impact with a broad, self-directed scope like this. It's an awesome job for the right person -- please pass it along if you think you know that person!)