Project Lead

VOLUNTEER CONTRIBUTOR OPPORTUNITY
Project Lead
Helpful Water projects portfolio
Project: Helpful Water projects portfolio
Engagement: Volunteer contributor (unpaid) on an open source project
Location: Remote and global; collaboration through Slack and shared repositories
Time commitment: Flexible; typically 4 to 6 hours per week, with a suggested commitment of six months or more
Recognition: OpenIP Recognition recorded on design documentation and repositories
How to apply: projects@helpfulengineering.org
About Helpful Engineering
Helpful Engineering is a global open engineering community and a registered US 501(c)(3) nonprofit. It began in March 2020 as a grassroots response to COVID-19 medical equipment shortages and, within ten days of launch, grew from 35 people to 2,700 active members in 92 countries. Today more than 20,000 community members contribute across healthcare, supply chain and manufacturing, agriculture, water, energy, and infrastructure, with every project aligned to the UN Sustainable Development Goals.
Helpful works as connective tissue, not the factory. Members propose ideas, form project teams, and receive the scaffolding most volunteer projects lack: mentorship, design review, build help, quality assurance, and routes to deployment. Of roughly 100 launched projects, ten reached prototype, five became buildable designs, and two, RespiraWorks and Project Tetra, grew into independent nonprofits. The organization is fully virtual and entirely volunteer run, coordinated through Slack, with Helpful Innovation Labs as its internal innovation team.
The Project: Helpful Water
Access to clean water underpins nearly every health outcome, yet in crisis and underserved settings water systems are often fragile, inconsistent, or absent. Helpful Water is Helpful Engineering's portfolio of modular water solutions, designed for simplicity, maintainability, and resilience, so that systems can be deployed, repaired, and sustained with minimal dependence on complex infrastructure. The portfolio is aligned with SDG 6 (clean water and sanitation) and sits within Helpful's programme of crisis-response systems.
Projects in the portfolio draw on these focus areas:
Decentralized wastewater treatment for off-grid communities
Water quality monitoring and contamination detection
Advanced filtration, desalination, and brine management
Water reuse and circular systems
Flood and drought management, and smart irrigation for agricultural regions
Water-sensitive urban design and digital water management tools
Nanoremediation of polluted sources
Open water projects succeed or fail on a familiar set of challenges: local conditions that defeat one-size-fits-all designs, coordination across disciplines with different vocabularies, prototypes that do not scale, systems that decline without maintenance, and regulatory requirements that arrive late. Every role in the portfolio exists to address one or more of these.
The Role
Project Leads own a single Helpful Water project from scoping through open publication. You will turn a water challenge into a clearly scoped project, assemble and guide a cross-disciplinary volunteer team, and keep the work documented, moving, and connected to the people who will deploy it. This is the role that makes the difference between an interesting idea and a design someone can actually build and maintain.
What You Will Do
Scope a project within one of the portfolio's focus areas, with a clear problem statement, deployment context, success measures, and stage gates.
Recruit and coordinate a volunteer team spanning engineers, hydrologists, environmental scientists, CAD designers, and public health specialists, across time zones, through Slack channels and regular working calls.
Translate between disciplines so the whole team works from shared requirements, assumptions, and terminology.
Build local fit and long-term operation into the design from the start: modular components, repairability, and maintenance protocols.
Engage early with deployment partners, communities, and, where relevant, regulators, so that designs can be used where they are needed.
Maintain the project's open repository, design documentation, decision log, and contributor record, including OpenIP Recognition entries.
Report progress to Helpful leadership and represent the project on community calls and in partner conversations.
What You Bring
Essential
Experience leading technical projects, programmes, or product development, ideally in water, environmental, civil, or humanitarian engineering
Comfort leading distributed volunteer teams, where influence matters more than authority
Enough working knowledge of water systems to frame problems and weigh trade-offs
Strong written communication and disciplined documentation habits
Reliability over a sustained period
Helpful to have
Water, sanitation, and hygiene (WASH) sector or NGO field deployment experience
Familiarity with open source hardware workflows, such as Git and GitHub
Working knowledge of SDG 6 targets and funding landscapes
Additional languages relevant to deployment regions
Volunteer Terms and OpenIP Recognition
This is an unpaid, volunteer contributor opportunity on an open source project. It does not create an employment or contractor relationship.
Designs, drawings, code, data, and documentation are published openly under Helpful Engineering's Contributor Agreement and licensing guidance, so anyone can build, adapt, and improve them.
Your contribution is credited through OpenIP Recognition, recorded by name on the project's design documentation and repositories. It is a permanent, public record of your work that you can point to.
Contribute only material you have the right to release openly. Please do not bring an employer's confidential or proprietary information into the project.
You work remotely with a global team, at a pace that fits around your professional and personal commitments.
How to Get Involved
Email projects@helpfulengineering.org with "Project Lead" in the subject line. Include a few sentences on your background and what draws you to the project, plus a link to your CV, LinkedIn profile, portfolio, or repository.
We will reply with an invitation to the Helpful Engineering Slack workspace and an introduction to the project team, so you can meet the people you would be working with before you commit.

Work arrangement
Yes