COTA’s Digital Trail Crew

Nerds of COTA is a volunteer tech corps for the Central Oregon Trail Alliance. We’re recruiting engineers, designers, mapmakers, data nerds, and IT pros to power the digital side of the trails you ride.

Get on the list

Modern trails need modern tools.

COTA stewards over 500 miles of singletrack, five bike parks, and a community thousands strong. Behind every workday, ride, and donation is a small mountain of digital infrastructure — websites, maps, donor tools, member systems, photos, stories, the whole stack.

Some of that infrastructure works great. Some of it could use love. All of it benefits from people who build digital things for a living showing up to help.

That’s Nerds of COTA — a volunteer corps for the keyboard side of trail work. Engineers, designers, mapmakers, photographers, data folks, IT pros, and anyone who makes the internet go.

This is the start of a multi-year build. Sign up, meet the crew, and help us decide where to swing the first digital pickaxe.

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Queries

  • People with passion for our trails and technical skills. Software engineers, designers, mapmakers, photographers, data nerds, and IT pros. Our first order of business is to organize as a group, assess priorities, and start working.

  • A mix of in-person around Bend and remote. We'll schedule the first gathering once we have a critical mass. Sign up to be in the loop.

  • We envision multiple levels of commitment. It could be as involved as entire projects, it could be just technical consultation to help us make decisions. Nothing will be mandatory and nobody's going to guilt-trip you for missing a meetup. You'll still have time for riding bikes.

  • Website, mapping projects, donor and member systems, content, tools for social media, internal tools, etc. We'll prioritize together based on what COTA needs and what the crew is excited about.

  • View the source, figure it out for yourself. We don't love it, and would like to change it.

  • Yes. Nerds of COTA runs with board oversight as part of COTA's volunteer program. We might even get swag at some point.

    As a volunteer you’d be eligible for our volunteer rewards like forest passes and bike gear.

  • No. Maybe a bike.

  • A little, but all emdashes are our own.