Call for Volunteers: Help Modernize Flaredown

About Flaredown

Flaredown is a symptom tracker for individuals with chronic conditions — Crohn's Disease, Fibromyalgia, Lupus, and many more. It gives users a tangible way to record their symptoms and provides real, structured information their healthcare providers can use to support diagnosis and treatment. Flaredown is used by individuals in over a hundred countries and has helped many treat, manage, and identify their conditions.

Flaredown was originally built in 2015 and is now showing its age. It has served its users well but needs to be updated, streamlined, and improved.

Current State

• Application: Mobile app with a Ruby on Rails backend
• Preferred stack for the rebuild: Ruby on Rails with Hotwire Native for mobile
• Code, license, and history: Available in this repository

The Work

The team will partner with Flaredown stakeholders to:

1. Understand the problem. Regular syncs with stakeholders to scope what needs to change and why.
2. Produce research artifacts. Personas, journey maps, mocks, and design documentation once the problem is well understood.
3. Plan data migration. An engineering assessment of what current user data exists and how it will be migrated to the new application.
4. Build iteratively. Develop the new application with user testing along the way to validate decisions.
5. Roll out to all users. Coordinate the cutover from the legacy app to the new one.
6. Fix bugs and stabilize. Address issues that surface post-launch.

Beyond building the app, the team will also navigate the rest of the project lifecycle like documentation, deployment to the Apple App Store and Google Play Store, and general project hygiene.

Team Composition

We're looking for 5–6 volunteers:

• 2 designers
• 1 product manager
• 3 software engineers

This isn't strict. We're happy to consider other team compositions if you want to suggestion one.

What We Provide

• A regular sync with someone from our side
• Availability in a Slack channel for asynchronous questions
• Introductions to Flaredown stakeholders
• Access to the codebase and historical context via this repository

Time Commitment

3–6 months, with each team member contributing a few hours per week. Software estimates are exactly that, estimates, and we'll work with the team to scope an MVP that fits the available time and iterate from there.

Restrictions

Because Flaredown stores health information that users share with their medical professionals as part of their care, this project is open primarily to teams with experienced members who have shipped production software before. We'd be glad to include some students or early-career folks as a learning and mentorship opportunity, but the core of the team should be experienced.

How to Apply

You can comment on the issue and we'll get in touch. We're volunteers too so don't panic if we don't respond instantly!

Review the repository and its historical context first; the issue does not identify files, tests, or a bounded starting task. Done means agreeing with stakeholders on an MVP, assessing migration and rollout needs, and delivering the staged rebuild with testing, deployment, and stabilization.