How GitHub Introduced a New Chapter for Open-Source Tech at Chayn

by Ellie Re’em

Introducing Ellie, Senior Software Engineer at Chayn

Hey everyone! It is long overdue for me to introduce myself and tell you a bit about what I’ve been up to at Chayn.

My name is Ellie, and I have been a Senior Software Engineer at Chayn for the last 2 years. My software engineering journey started at Founders and Coders, a non-profit providing free software engineer training, focusing on tech for good. After I graduated, I worked for a variety of organisations such as The Wellcome Trust and Ovo Energy. After a while working in these larger, more corporate settings I decided the environment wasn’t quite right for me. I started working with Chayn, seeking to put my efforts into more meaningful projects and to work in an environment that aligns better with my values.

When I started at Chayn, Bloom, our online support platform for survivors, had only just launched. Since then, we have developed a new Whatsapp subscription service, Notes from Bloom, added new courses, new languages, activities and grounding exercises, all while constantly improving the design. This year we’re spending more of our time on the other products in what we call our ‘Chayn universe’, and figuring out how they can better serve survivors’ needs.

The balancing act

Surprisingly, for an organisation with so many tech products (e.g. Soul Medicine, chayn.co, and guides such as Manipulation is Abuse and the Good Friend Guide), there are only one or two engineers working at Chayn at one time. Ideally, all our services would be well maintained and consistently improved but the balancing act leaves products behind.

This is why open-source is invaluable to us. Not only does it promote transparency among our tech products, but it enables the greater developer community to contribute to our cause.

In the past, Chayn tried hybrid volunteer / staff development teams to utilise all the brilliant volunteers out there, but this proved a challenge. Without utilizing GitHub for it’s full potential, the onboarding process for new volunteers took too long, and this proved to be demotivating for us all. Engineers’ attention was too divided between guiding volunteers and meeting deadlines with the in-house deliverables we were working on. Therefore, we decided to pause our program to find a better process. We knew that collaborating with volunteers in the open was the right path — working in the open is a core principle at Chayn — we just hadn’t figured out the best way to do it. We value transparent work practices and producing open-source materials, and above all, know we can learn a great deal from the expertise that volunteers have.

Our new collaborative journey with GitHub

Fortunately, in 2023 and 2024, we were selected to take part in GitHub’s DPG (Digital Public Good) Open-Source Community Manager Program. GitHub is the world leader in web-based code hosting, that Chayn uses for open-source code management. This program helped Digital Public Goods like Chayn understand how to grow communities of open-source contributors and achieve long-term sustainability. I’ve worked on open-source projects myself before, but this program was my first exposure to open-source community management. I learnt that we needed to invest in our open-source infrastructure, and have a dedicated person to manage and advocate for the community. Ultimately, staff and volunteers need to work on different streams. This way, staff engineers can focus on deadlines and reactive work, while the open-source community can work to a different cadence, focusing on non-urgent features and maintenance.

To build out our first official open-source team, GitHub partnered us with a Tech Community Manager and Developer Advocate, Kylee Fields, to streamline the open-source developer experience and give the community the attention they deserved. GitHub’s generous donation allowed us to trial working with Kylee, resulting in successful growth of our open-source community in the later half of 2023 and into 2024. This included designing contributor flows and processes, optimising our knowledge base for contributor autonomy, maintaining our repositories, creating GitHub Actions automations, and conducting outreach. Within 4 months of 2024, Kylee launched an optimized open-source volunteer program, and grew our open-source contributions to an average 3 pull requests merged onto our codebases a week. Most notably, our open-source, remote trauma support platform Bloom, received the majority of these contributions, from new features to increased test coverage.

Another success story came from GitHub’s Skills-Based Volunteer Program, which enabled GitHub developers to make valuable contributions to projects that needed it the most, such as Soul Medicine. Soul Medicine is one of Chayn’s most popular products that provides resources for survivors in bite-sized pieces, either emailed to you or accessible in multiple languages online. However, Soul Medicine is built in Ruby, which we do not always have expertise for in-house. Volunteers through GitHub’s program contributed over 150 commits to Soul Medicine, offloading over a month’s worth of work from Chayn’s development team. This revitalised Soul Medicine by filling the gap in our available experts and enabled Soul Medicine to continue making an impact on 43,000+ users.

Get Involved

With the help of GitHub’s Community Manager and Skills-Based Volunteer programs, GitHub has made an immeasurable impact on Chayn’s open-source community. We are committed to nourishing our contributor community for the long-term, and finding ways to better use open-source to serve our mission.

Interested in making an impact with Chayn? There are many ways to support our work:

• Join our volunteer waitlist, sign up on our Getting Involved Guide ❤
• Become a Chayn sponsor on GitHub ❤ ️
• Consider open-source contributions ❤ ️ ️
• Don’t have time to be a volunteer or contribute code? Help us find more amazing open-source contributors by simply following Chayn on GitHub and starring our featured repositories ❤ ️ ️
• Follow Chayn on social media ❤

Have questions or feedback? Reach us at techcommunity@chayn.co 🌸