Position Summary

The Environmental Data and Governance Initiative (EDGI) is searching for a Remote Project Manager for a 12-month, three-quarters time contracted position, to help us set the direction of archiving projects, direct development, and coordinate with volunteers and other organizations around our Archiving Working Group. The position will begin in September and is potentially renewable for an additional 9 months.

Video call interviews will be conducted June 26-27. Candidates will need to make themselves available on those dates. EDGI will make every effort to provide reasonable advance notice of interview schedule.

About EDGI

The Environmental Data & Governance Initiative (EDGI) is a network of academics and non-profits addressing potential threats to United States federal environmental and energy policy, and to the scientific research infrastructure built to investigate, inform, and enforce them. EDGI is a distributed collaboration operating under the fiscal sponsorship of the non-profit, Public Lab, with volunteer members across North America. EDGI working groups:

• monitor changes to tens of thousands of web pages across U.S. federal agencies (such as the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Energy) to trace how environmental data, information, and their presentation change;
• interview long-time federal employees to provide a human and nuanced perspective on impacts of the current administration on agencies;
• run public campaigns on and analyze environmental, energy, and climate policy and regulation, focusing on changes in agency's governance of scientific information and data;
• develop community-driven processes for archiving, stewarding, and sharing data (especially environmental data), with the aim of building just and sustainable relationships between data and communities (this is the working group you'll be working with); and
• recognize the many conflicting justice concerns that data manifests and aims to bring together research communities to struggle together across these differences with a commitment to intersectional justice.

Location

Remote. You must be legally able to work in the United States.

Term

This is a grant-funded position with a salary of approximately $4000/month. The Archiving Remote Project Manager will work approximately 30 hours per week (three-quarters time), with some flexibility from week to week and an expectation of higher commitment levels during busy periods. This is a contracted position for one year, with the possibility of renewal for the remainder of the grant period, approximately 9 additional months. The first three months of the contract will be considered a trial period.

Here are some of the things you'll do:

• Maintain and communicate an overall picture of the project's direction, and eventually assume responsibility for setting high and low-level priorities consonant with EDGI's mission
• Facilitate design research during early stages of project ideation
• Participate in group calls, Slack discussions, and conversations with subgroups, including steering committee, developers, and partner organizations during business and off-peak hours across North American time zones
• Represent archiving working group's concerns and needs to other EDGI working groups and committees
• Coordinate archiving and community technology development priorities for EDGI's diverse community of open-source volunteers using protocols of horizontal governance
• Ensure EDGI has a reliable process for deploying software updates and responding to emergency issues. This may mean deploying software yourself, writing documentation, maintaining issues in Github or other task management system, community management, etc.

As a Remote Project Manager, you will prioritize and assign design and development tasks, maintain an overall view of the project, coordinate discussion on various communication channels, and help to onboard volunteers. You will direct volunteer efforts effectively and provide partner organizations and other teams within EDGI with a consistent point of contact. You will also ensure that specific obligations incurred by our grant relationships are delivered on time by our community. Some examples of deliverables include:

• Organize community events to prototype and refine archiving practices and projects
• Lead creation of public "User Journeys" detailing challenges for maintaining public access to environmental data
• Manage process of "Problem Mapping" to understand different assessments for determining how public environmental data is "vulnerable"
• Re-launch EDGI's Archiving Toolkit with reusable resources for groups engaged in similar activities
• Represent EDGI within the Data Together partnership and bring new organizations into the project
• Write the Archiving portion of the monthly grants progress report for our fiscal sponsor, Public Lab
• Coordinate with EDGI's financial team regarding Archiving expenses

Qualifications and skills we are looking for:

• Project management experience working with remote and/or informal teams
• Design research experience (e.g., developing personas, mapping user journeys, and project post-mortems)
• Experience working within volunteer and/or open source development communities
• Interest in working with a horizontal and collaborative organization that values diversity and respectful online spaces, in line with our Code of Conduct
• Proactivity in organizing, documenting, and communicating effectively with stakeholders
• Good written and verbal communication skills
• Availability to work across North American time zones during business and off-peak hours to support remote volunteer development community (we use Slack and Zoom extensively)
• Ability to balance scalability and long term goals against immediate and concrete needs
• A preference for simple, broadly-understood, and well-tested solutions over complex ones and strong opinions about when to build custom tools
• Experience writing and/or contributing to software in at least one of the following languages: Python, JavaScript Frameworks (e.g., React), golang
• Comfort with git and GitHub, including managing work through Github issues and pull requests
• Adherence to policies and procedures; support forEDGI's mission, vision, and values, which include justice; environmental and human health; intersectionality; anti-facism, anti-racism, and anti-oppression; accessibility; participatory knowledge making; and responsivity and proactivity

¡BONUS!:

• Familiarity with or previous contributions to EDGI project
• Experience deploying to Amazon Web Services, Heroku, or other cloud infrastructure services
• Familiarity with container orchestration, including use of Docker, Kubernetes, Chef, or Ansible
• Experience organizing an open-source software project
• Programming skills (in languages specified above) required to fill gaps in volunteer capacity by performing code reviews or contributing code to address high-priority issues
• Non-profit experience

Application Process

To be considered for this position please email us at hiring@envirodatagov.org by June 22, 2018. Be sure to include the phrase "Archiving PM Job Application" in your subject line, as well as the following attachments:

• Resume or CV
• Cover letter outlining why you are a fit for the position
• Short project recap of a problem you solved coordinating a remote team, working on an open-source project, or managing volunteers. We want to know how you thought through it, what didn't work (not just what did), and what you learned. It should be more than just a short paragraph. If you can express this best in a slide deck, video, or some other format besides writing, that's ok, too

Finalists will be asked for contact information for three references.

EDGI strives to acknowledge and reduce barriers for members of equity-seeking groups through fair hiring practices and enaction of its values. We expect everyone to follow our Code of Conductand principles of friendliness, respect, empathy, and open communication.