We drank the techno-Kool-Aid. At Freelancers Union, everyone from the Executive Director to our team of coders and hackers believes that technology—plus brain juice—equals a powerful tool for accomplishing our goals.

Enhancing and building the Freelancers Union platform brings up lots of very different challenges. We try to find the right tool for every job.

We’re big believers in open source: Linux runs most of our servers and development, Apache serves our website, and we use several different frameworks and toolkits when building our applications.

Tech’s favorite languages these days are Python and Java, and since our members see most of our work via the web, we’re also using more and more JavaScript.

Web work is supported by the excellent YUI and jQuery libraries. These tools have helped us create progressively enhanced user interfaces that ensure our website is easy to use for all our members.

Well, we hope if you’re a techie with freelancing tendencies you’re already a member of Freelancers Union. (If not, correct that error!)

Public Projects

Technology also has some projects that might be useful outside our organization:

Crisis Camp Brooklyn—Haiti Earthquake

Crisis Camp Brooklyn

After the 2010 earthquake in Haiti, Freelancers Union hosted a Crisis Camp hack-a-thon for the New York area. People from around the city got together to brainstorm and work on technology that could support rescue efforts.

One of the projects tossed around that day was a tool to pull missing person reports from the Red Cross and make them available through Google’s Person Finder Database, which centralizes missing person data and makes it easy to search and use.

That tool, the ICRC Bot, is open source and available at BitBucket:

You can download the CCBK icrcbot source code if you’re interested in spidering Red Cross data or converting it to the open PFIF person finder format.