Cohort 1 · open now
Every Forge project is a real Irish site with real visitors and a real backlog. You don't build a toy todo app — you ship a feature on a site people actually use. Pick the project that fits, apply, and we'll match you to a mentor and a starting ticket within 48 hours.
Help build Ireland's largest local-news network. 50,000+ monthly readers across 32 counties.
localnews.ie aggregates court reports, council minutes, planning applications, deaths notices, GAA fixtures and local news from every Irish county into one searchable index. The backlog: county-specific source scrapers, dedup work, town pages, council-minutes ingestion, JSON-LD enrichment, and a long list of "this town in Mayo has no source feeding it" gaps.
Junior / mid Python or web devs. Bonus if you've touched BeautifulSoup, Playwright, or any scraping work before — but mentor support covers the gaps. Also suitable for journalists who want to learn a bit of Python by shipping it.
One 15-minute mentor check-in per week. One small thing shipped per week. Async chat for unblockers. No long meetings, no busywork — the deadline is the live site noticing your code.
Standard Forge: 4 closed tickets + 4 weeks of presence + Kali signs off the work is real and shipped.
National directory of every pub in Ireland. Built on OpenStreetMap + Logainm. The data exists — it just needs a human to make it useful.
pubhub.ie has thousands of Irish pubs imported from OpenStreetMap and reconciled with Logainm placenames, but most listings are missing the things that actually matter to a visitor: opening hours, photos, food / no-food, music nights, sport TVs, social media links, accessibility info. Every enriched listing makes the directory more useful — and more rankable in search.
Writers, designers, juniors who want to learn data work without being a coder. No programming required — most of the work is research, writing, and tagging in a spreadsheet that we sync back to the site. Great for someone who loves Irish culture and wants a substantial public output.
Pick a county on day one. Ship ~25% of it each week. One 15-minute weekly check-in with the mentor to review your county page and tagging quality.
One county fully enriched + landing page published + 4 weeks of presence + Kali signs off. Your name appears on the county page as a contributor and on the references page.
A 39-page editorial play on Irish identity, PPS, fraud, and the practicalities of being an identified person in Ireland. Looking for writers who can do original research.
myid.ie ranks on long-tail Irish identity queries (PPS, public services card, replacing a passport, identity fraud in Ireland). The backlog: 10 new explainer pages on under-served queries, FAQ expansion on existing ranking pages, internal linking improvements, and original-research add-ons (case studies, citations of CSO / DOJ / Garda stats) that lift the pages above thin AI competitor content.
Writers, journalists, researchers, junior PMs. If you can call the Department of Social Protection, pull a stat from CSO, read a Garda annual report, or rewrite a piece of government jargon into plain English — this is your project. No coding needed; everything ships as markdown via the existing build.
Week 1: pick your cluster + draft outlines. Weeks 2–3: ship one page each. Week 4: polish, internal-linking pass, sign-off. One 20-min editorial review with the mentor each week.
Standard Forge: 4 shipped pieces of work + 4 weeks of presence + mentor sign-off. Your name appears as author on the pages and on the references page.
Parish councils, GAA clubs, Tidy Towns committees, charities, men's sheds, family resource centres, community gardens — if your organisation needs digital work it can't afford, submit it. We pick 1–2 community-group projects per quarter as cooperative tracks. Members get to point at a real Irish organisation they helped, and your group gets a finished thing built.
What kinds of projects fit? A simple website, a fixtures or events calendar, a volunteer signup form, a local directory, a fundraising page, a digital newsletter setup, a basic donation flow. We're looking for projects that 5–8 cohort members can ship in 4–8 weeks — not full custom software.
Submit your community-group project →Submissions are reviewed monthly. We get back to every group within 14 days, even if it's a "not this quarter".
Honest answer: it's the fastest way to give cohort 1 real shipping pressure with real users — and we already have the mentor on hand (Kali owns these sites).
localnews.ie serves 50k+ readers a month. pubhub.ie ranks for "pubs in <county>". myid.ie ranks for Irish identity queries. Your code or content goes live in front of real people, not a portfolio sandbox.
Kali built these sites. There's no week-long ramp where everyone gets lost in someone else's stack. You ask, you get an answer that day, you ship.
The town page you ship to localnews.ie. The county you enrich on pubhub.ie. The explainer you publish on myid.ie. They're all there 12 months later. Recruiters can see them. Search engines can see them. Your name's on them.
Once cohort 1 ships, we add community-group projects (parish councils, GAA clubs, charities). They produce the most quotable references — "I built the volunteer signup for X charity" reads better than any portfolio link.