Took a deep dive yesterday comparing a few tagging/classification algorithms to the Google Cloud Natural Language and AWS Comprehend APIs, and I have to say I'm impressed.
I've been searching for the right tool to try to add tagging to a large dataset of charitable data, and while I couldn't find anything off the shelf at Algorithmia, the GUI allows for easy forking and adjustment of existing algorithms. As a primarily front-end developer, never thought machine learning would be this accessible. Great work!
If there's something that you need—please use the chat box to tell us what you need. We have engineers that are constantly helping devs get their algos dialed in. If you're doing 501c3 work you can probably ask for some bonus credits as well (we love helping good causes :) )
You might be able to pull off the payments side using cryptocurrencies. Check out the CharityCoin directory for Bitcoin addresses: https://github.com/charitycoin/directory. You also might want to check in with the Stellar folks (http://slack.stellar.org/). They're working on some cool international projects dealing with financial inclusion, though there's a good chance you'll have to build the necessary connections to the Stellar network yourself.
The problem here is that I'll have to fill up a wallet with Bitcoin now, and then pay them later. That takes away the sting of, "Wow, being lazy cost me money". Still, right now, this is the one of the best ideas I've found. Paypal has a Payments API, and I can pay charities through it, but it's not a very good API, and it really seems like it'll be painful.
You'd think it would be easier to give money away!
@pc - curious if you have plans to integrate ACH into your Checkout product. Seems like an incredibly difficult UX problem, but I'm sure your folks are up to the challenge :)
No immediate plans. ACH is mostly popular for B2B use-cases whereas Checkout is optimized for "lightweight" transactions. You can obviously imagine cases where an integration would be useful but we decided not to hold up the launch in order to build that. We'll calibrate based on feedback going forward.
@pc How do you feel about the assumed fraud risk you are taking on with this? I'd love to have a conversation with you about it (in private). You can email me at rwmurray (@) vt.edu. I know you all have quite a few vulnerabilities in your system and can't ever find a way to share them.
I agree with others the look and feel can be improved. A great solution to that problem is the open source project JSONResume [0] and its brother-from-another-mother HackMyResume [1].
The exercise of entering your information as structured data may be beneficial in itself (both projects run off a JSON file), as the schema forces you to adopt generally accepted best practices (e.g. each job should contain a short intro summary with a few bullet points to showcase accomplishments/highlights). The primary benefit is it gives you access to dozens of well designed templates, many geared towards recent CS grads.
This is a fantastic idea @trevyn, love it! Reminds me a bit of the Awesome Foundation [0], a community of independent chapters around the world that give $1k to interesting people and projects with absolutely no strings attached. No tax breaks, no catches, some people just want to sponsor cool stuff. Good on you!
Personally though, I've found getting to know a local nonprofit can be most rewarding. In my experience, almost all nonprofits can use a soundboard for general web development...feedback on an agency's statement of work, integrating 3rd party donate buttons, assessing new CMS's, etc. If you have the time to do the work yourself, all the better.
Come help us out at www.secfirst.org. We are building a free mobile app to help journalists, aid workers and activists manage their digital and physical security.
https://github.com/PineappleFund/pineapplefund.github.io