Ruby on Rails Developer

Phone/Skype Hire. Remote

Location: Remote

Duration: 12+ months

The Ruby on Rails Programmer will provide technical design, development, and maintenance services for the organization's Decidim-based digital participation platform. Decidim is a participatory democracy framework based on multiple Ruby on Rails engines that are mounted on top of a Ruby on Rails application. Work may include implementing new features, customizing Decidim modules, and ensuring smooth integration with existing systems and organizational workflows. The Programmer will collaborate with internal stakeholders to understand requirements, translate them into technical specifications, and deliver well-structured, maintainable code that aligns with Decidim's architecture and community best practices. Services may include building and enhancing platform functionality using Ruby on Rails and other components of the Decidim stack, performing configuration and customization of modules such as Participatory Budgeting, Proposals, and Accountability. The Programmer will also conduct code reviews, troubleshoot issues, resolve bugs, and implement performance improvements to ensure platform reliability, usability, and security. As needed, the Programmer may also support deployment and DevOps processes-such as managing environments, CI/CD workflows, and cloud hosting-to maintain stable and secure platform operation.

Responsibilities

1. Assisting in upgrading the Ruby on Rails-based platform, Decidim, to the latest version (.31). Updating of the latest version of Decidim will enable us to use the following features:

• Taxonomies - These will give us flexibility in how we display projects and ideas on the website based on categories we create.
• Improve how we sort and filter projects and ideas
• Spam prevention - Currently the CEC spends time manually flagging spam accounts. This feature can save us enormous amounts of time.
• Bulk action answers to proposals (what we call ideas) through Answers Templates - This is a huge improvement - it's a feature that would allow us to move ideas from the Idea Generation

Phase of The People's Money process in bulk through our process.

• For example, if we decide that 100 of the ideas are disqualified because they're capital projects, we can select all 100 at once and compose a single message to display: "This idea did not advance to Assemblies because it's a capital project" - this helps us to address the problem of processing proposals at scale
• Enabling the built-in text editor to include alt text for embedded images. This is a very important accessibility feature that is currently not included in the text editor.
• Reordering and hiding menu items
• Bulk actions in Accountability components, allowing us to change the progress of projects in the Implementation Phase (see The People's Money process) in bulk instead of individually.
• Importing Proposals (Ideas) directly into Accountability component.

2. Upgrading/repairing existing features on the platform:

a. Updating and repairing Term Customizer, the Decidim feature that allows us to persist/propagate changes to built-in terms that come with Decidim. This feature needs to be updated so that all the new terms on the platform are customizable - currently it's only a limited set.

• Create nomenclature rules for translation sets
• Fix bugs/race conditions in Term Customizer
• b. Repairing and customizing Groups feature for easier usability
• Fixing bugs in the Groups feature
• Creating views for users to see statistics on their usage

c. Fixing bugs in export feature

d. Fixing bugs with image attachments and display

e. Fixing bugs with outbound links

f. Fixing bugs with account creation

Skills Needed

At least four years of experience with Ruby on Rails.

Ability to onboard quickly to new platforms and systems, balancing independence with seeking support.

Minimum four years of experience with version control.

Minimum four years of experience in front-end web development including JavaScript and CSS.

Minimum four years of experience working closely with other developers, project managers, and/or designers on a team.

Candidate's resume MUST include a link to portfolio.

Experience working in an agile, iterative development setting.

Experience working in AWS.

Candidate's resume MUST include a link to portfolio.