We’re looking for a few individuals who are interested in helping keep the exchange up and running! Below we’ve outlined a few ways that volunteers can contribute to our mission. All
If you’re interested in volunteering, please fill out our volunteer form.
Technical Volunteers
The Technical Committee is actively looking for for volunteers to help us design, implement, monitor, and maintain everything on the exchange. Everyone in our group is always learning, and we’re happy to bring you up to speed on any of the technologies we use. If you’re already got experience, we would also welcome your help training others! All our collaboration is done remotely via Slack and Google Meet.
Here are some of the technical skills we’re currently looking for:
- Network Monitoring and Observability – We utilize TSDB’s such as Influx, Prometheus, and RRDtool, as well as visualization tools like Grafana and MRTG. We need people who have experience in managing these kinds of systems, to keep them running at peak performance.
- Hardware/Cabling – You can’t very well have an internet exchange without the physical hardware and cables! We’re looking for people who live local to our PoPs to aid us in maintaining and documenting all the gear and interconnections that make up the exchange.
- Remote Hands – We’re grateful that our colocation partners provide remote hands services for us, but volunteers who live local to our data centers can save us a bunch of money in remote hands fees for the occasional things like cleaning optical connections or aligning fiber.
- Automation and Systems Administration – We’ve built a highly-available virtual environment to run all our internal (and some external!) services. To manage all these systems, we utilize Salt, along with various custom python, PHP, and bash scripts. All our Linux systems run either Ubuntu or Debian GNU/Linux.
- Technical Documentation – We want to make sure that no matter who comes or goes from our organization, everyone always knows what’s going on and how things work. To that end, we want to make sure we always keep our internal documentation fresh and up to date. Like to write how-to guides? We could really use your skills!
Business Volunteers
Our Business Team is in change of all things accounts payable/accounts receivable. They invoice members for yearly dues, pay our vendors for the goods and services the exchange consumes, and are also involved in negotiating vendor contracts (along with our Board of Directors).
If you have experience running a company or a non-profit, or have any other kind of customer service or business skills, we would welcome your help on our Business Team!
Outreach Volunteers
Our mission is to try to improve the quality and availability of the internet in and around the Philadelphia metro area. To that end, we’re looking for people to reach out to networks in and around the Philadelphia area, to try and increase our membership!
In addition to email outreach, we’d also like to sponsor individuals to travel to various trade shows, conventions, and conferences to evangelize our humble Philadelphia Internet Exchange, and explain what it can do for local networks. If you like to travel, or sell things, this might be an opportunity for you!
Board Positions
Our Board of Directors makes all the important decisions for the organization. From expansion planning, to vendor contract negotiation, to approving and managing expenditures, our board keeps our vision on track. In order to ensure we’re properly representing our city, its communities, and its businesses properly, we want to extend a welcome to those interested in joining our board to add their voice to the decision making.
All our board members are volunteers, and not compensated in any way for their service. The board is comprised of industry veterans and members of local businesses. If you’re one of those too, please reach out to us about a spot on our Board of Directors! Board members are expected to volunteer at least 2 hours a month, to attend our monthly Board meetings.