My Journey into Community Management with Social Income
I’ve always wanted to explore community management, and this year, I embraced every opportunity.
Managing communities has always been something I wanted to explore. This year, I finally decided to take on every opportunity to do so. And it has been an incredible journey filled with challenges that have pushed me to develop new skills and learn in unexpected ways.
One of the most impactful experiences has been joining Social Income as a community manager through the GitHub DPG Open Source Community Manager Program. The program connects community managers with digital public goods (DPGs) that need support engaging external contributors.
Before joining the program, I knew nothing about DPGs. So if like me you’re unfamiliar with DPGs, they are open-source solutions—including software, data, and AI models that adhere to the DPG Standard. This standard ensures alignment with the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) while complying with privacy laws and harm prevention practices. DPGs play a vital role in creating equitable systems by reducing vendor lock-in and fostering local innovation.
Of course, this blog post won’t be complete without telling you what Social Income is. Social Income is a non-profit organization established under Swiss law in 2019. Their mission is to combat poverty by collecting donations and converting them into unconditional basic income, which is then sent via Mobile Money to the phones of people living in poverty in the Global South. This radically simple approach combines transparency with empowerment, helping recipients reinvest locally and thrive.
For two months, I’ve been leading efforts to highlight the Social Income community volunteers and contributors. One of my tasks was developing a webpage using the GitHub REST API to display the Public repository insights of Social Income. This includes showing a list of contributors and a table of open issues. This effort makes the community more visible and welcoming to new collaborators.
Moving forward, I’ll be working on developing and implementing strategies for the long-term growth and sustained engagement of Social Income’s open-source community. Additionally, I will continue contributing code and assisting with onboarding new developers.
So if you’re interested in fighting poverty and contributing to the Social Income project, please contact me or visit the project on GitHub.