Consultancy 12 months: Junior Open-Source Community Manager (Giga), Barcelona, Spain

UNICEF works in some of the world’s toughest places, to reach the world’s most disadvantaged children. To save their lives. To defend their rights. To help them fulfill their potential. 

Across 190 countries and territories, we work for every child, everywhere, every day, to build a better world for everyone. 

And we never give up. 

For every child…Innovate

UNICEF has a 70-year history of innovating for children. We believe that new approaches, partnerships and technologies that support realizing children’s rights are critical to improving their lives.

The Office of Innovation is a creative, interactive, and agile team in UNICEF. We sit at a unique intersection, where an organization that works on huge global issues meets the start-up thinking, the technology, and the partners that turn this energy into scalable solutions.

About Giga

Launched in 2019 as a joint initiative between UNICEF and ITU, Giga has set the ambitious goal to connect every school in the world to the internet.  Half of the world’s population has no regular access to the Internet. Millions of children leave school without any digital skills, making it much more difficult for them to thrive and contribute to local and global economies. This has created a digital divide between those who are connected and those who are not, a divide that has become even wider during the Covid-19 pandemic. UNICEF and ITU have therefore joined forces to create Giga, an initiative to connect every school in the world to the Internet and address this new form of inequality. 

Giga focuses on connecting schools so that children and young people have access to information, opportunity, and choice. It also uses schools as anchor points for their surrounding communities: if you connect the school, you can also connect local businesses and services. This creates opportunities for service providers to generate revenue from paying users, making connectivity more sustainable. A 2021 report by the Economist Intelligence Unit found that a 10% increase in school connectivity can increase effective years of schooling by 0.6% and increase GDP per capita by 1.1%. 

You can read more about Giga’s work at https://giga.global/ and by following us on twitter @Gigaglobal

How can you make a difference? 

We are looking for a motivated open-source Junior Community Manager to join the Giga team. This diverse and hands-on role will help support the ideation and execution of Giga’s open-source strategy. We are looking for someone who is eager to make Giga a champion of open source – who is unafraid to get their hands dirty by combing through pull requests and drafting documentation but who also understands the nuance of and is excited to engage with different technical and non-technical communities. The open-source community manager will help shape and nurture the healthy development and growth of our open-source products.

In particular you will:

Creating enabling processes and standards to streamline and improve Giga’s open-source roadmap, including:

• Supporting the implementation of Giga’s open-source strategy
• Promoting adoption of standards and processes to bolster Giga’s open-source commitment, including technical documentation templates, community guidelines, checklists and code reviews, amongst others.
• Developing product-specific open-source roadmaps in collaboration with product owners, including identifying relevant technical and non-technical communities to engage with, creating OKRs and implementation plans, selecting licenses, etc.

Supporting the implementation of Giga’s open-source roadmap, including:

• Supporting execution of product-specific open-source roadmaps, encompassing the creation and iteration of product documentation (such as issue trackers and contributor incentives) and engagement and follow-up with relevant communities of the team across product ideation and development on how best to build and sustain vibrant open-source projects.

Building and iteratively improving Giga’s brand as a tech, open source, and digital public goods champion

• Contributing to building greater cultural awareness for open source within Giga.
• Liaising with Giga team members as needed to create product communication and marketing materials to disseminate the achievements (and failures!) of Giga’s technology work.
• Helping organize online as well as offline events geared towards growing a vibrant community of technical and non-technical Giga collaborators, for example, hosting X Spaces, hackathons, and webinars.
• Keeping abreast of the latest developments in the open-source community

Please access the full Term of Reference (ToRs) and read a more detailed description of the assignment in this file in order to prepare your financial proposal and know more about the role:  Jr. Open-Source Community Manager.pdf

To qualify as an advocate for every child you will have… 

• A first-level university degree in software development, engineering, or a related technical field or relevant studies in the field is considered an asset.
• 3 years of experience in the field, preferably in developer or community projects.
• Track record of ongoing contributions to one or more open-source projects.
• Understanding of version control systems (e.g., Git) and project management tools.
• Experience in community management, including facilitating and growing communities is required.
• Experience working within UNICEF or having strong exposure to country offices is considered an asset.
• Strong planning/organizing skills. Prior experience planning events is desirable.
• Knowledge of social media channels (especially X, formerly Twitter) is required.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills and enthusiasm for public speaking.
• Proven capacity to work with collaborative teams across different locations and with different technical skills.
• Fluency in English is required. Proficiency in an additional official UN language (Arabic, Chinese, French, Russian or Spanish) is an asset.

Payment details and further considerations:

• Payment of professional fees will be based on the submission of agreed deliverables. UNICEF reserves the right to withhold payment in case the deliverables submitted are not up to the required standard or in case of delays in submitting the deliverables on the part of the consultant.
• The consultant is responsible for his/her own health and travel insurance.
• Consultant is responsible for arranging his/her own travel, including visa.
• This consultancy is based in Barcelona.

How to apply:

• Interested applicants are required to submit a financial proposal with an all-inclusive fee.  Please see the financial proposal template here: Consultancy Financial Offer template.docx
• Financial proposal must include travel costs (economy class) and daily subsistence allowance, if travel is required as per TOR and any other estimated costs: visa, travel/health insurance
• Applications without a financial proposal will not be considered.

For every Child, you demonstrate… 

UNICEF’s values of Care, Respect, Integrity, Trust, Accountability, and Sustainability (CRITAS). 

To view our competency framework, please visit  here. 

 UNICEF is here to serve the world’s most disadvantaged children and our global workforce must reflect the diversity of those children. The UNICEF family is committed to include everyone, irrespective of their race/ethnicity, age, disability, gender identity, sexual orientation, religion, nationality, socio-economic background, or any other personal characteristic.

UNICEF offers reasonable accommodation for consultants/individual contractors with disabilities. This may include, for example, accessible software, travel assistance for missions or personal attendants. We encourage you to disclose your disability during your application in case you need reasonable accommodation during the selection process and afterwards in your assignment. 

UNICEF has a zero-tolerance policy on conduct that is incompatible with the aims and objectives of the United Nations and UNICEF, including sexual exploitation and abuse, sexual harassment, abuse of authority and discrimination. UNICEF also adheres to strict child safeguarding principles. All selected candidates will be expected to adhere to these standards and principles and will therefore undergo rigorous reference and background checks. Background checks will include the verification of academic credential(s) and employment history. Selected candidates may be required to provide additional information to conduct a background check. 

Remarks:  

Only shortlisted candidates will be contacted and advance to the next stage of the selection process. 

Individuals engaged under a consultancy or individual contract will not be considered “staff members” under the Staff Regulations and Rules of the United Nations and UNICEF’s policies and procedures, and will not be entitled to benefits provided therein (such as leave entitlements and medical insurance coverage). Their conditions of service will be governed by their contract and the General Conditions of Contracts for the Services of Consultants and Individual Contractors. Consultants and individual contractors are responsible for determining their tax liabilities and for the payment of any taxes and/or duties, in accordance with local or other applicable laws. 

The selected candidate is solely responsible to ensure that the visa (applicable) and health insurance required to perform the duties of the contract are valid for the entire period of the contract. Selected candidates are subject to confirmation of fully-vaccinated status against SARS-CoV-2 (Covid-19) with a World Health Organization (WHO)-endorsed vaccine, which must be met prior to taking up the assignment. It does not apply to consultants who will work remotely and are not expected to work on or visit UNICEF premises, programme delivery locations or directly interact with communities UNICEF works with, nor to travel to perform functions for UNICEF for the duration of their consultancy contracts.