How can IT professionals help the community with large projects?

The initiative has to come from them. They should get together, work out a complete written plan and submit it, showing which tasks they can take on. Then it can be reviewed and improved.

Many people with technical knowledge want to serve their community and ask where they are needed. The obvious expectation is that tasks will be assigned to them. But in a field as large and varied as information technology, the reverse works better.

The professionals themselves know best what they can do and how much time they have. They know their field, and they also know the community with its tasks and problems. Someone giving them instructions from outside on a blank sheet cannot see all of this as clearly. So the first step has to come from them.

The best course is for them to get together and work out a written plan jointly. As a complete package it should show which problems can be solved with their help and how the community could present itself better to the world. Once such a proposal exists, it can be gone through, priorities can be set, and advice can be given on how the work in one area or another can be improved.

The first verse above speaks of people who stand together like a solid structure. The second calls for a group that invites to good. The hadith describes believers as a building whose parts hold one another firm. Individual professionals can achieve a great deal. When they pool their strengths and come with a shared plan, it becomes something that lasts.