I've asked this question a few times but haven't really gotten a satisfactory answer. There are a lot of what I might call "epic problems" out there. Malaria, homelessness, HIV, refugees, war, climate change, income inequality, gender inequality, hate crimes.

I don't know anything about creating vaccines or cures for malaria or HIV. I don't have a degree in social work or behavior science. I don't have any experience with economics outside of personal investment and filing my income tax paperwork each year. I don't have billions of dollars to fund a company to focus on these things.

I make a small salary relative to what's required for these things and have very limited knowledge.

I'm a programmer and a manager. So how do I contribute to these problems? How can I take the skills I have and get homeless people the help they need? How do I take my web development skills and reduce income inequality? How do I help stop the next Trayvon Martin incident?

I have no idea. This article goes into great detail about climate change, but I finished reading it and still have no idea. I don't even know where to start.

> Re: Malaria, homelessness, HIV, refugees, war, climate change, income inequality, gender inequality, hate crimes.

There are tons of informatics needs for modeling malaria genome evolution specially against emergence of front-line drug resistance that is spreading from SE Asia to Africa. Tools need to be built to inform public health officials where the genome's gene flow is headed next to modify the front-line treatment to contain the spread (e.g., Real-time genomic surveillance of Artesminin resistance of Plasmodium).

There is an entire open-source community of people uploading and sharing time-stamped genomic samples of malaria and host information if you are interested (http://www.malariagen.net/).

Similarly for HIV, there are lots of public health research groups doing modeling of HIV transmission, applied to specific local communities to contain an epidemic. Web front-end needs to be made and data pipelines that crunch incoming input data is needed. Most of this work is done in academic labs where information is only broadcasted on papers but could use a nicer front-end open to public and automated back-end for production data crunching. (e.g., http://web2.research.partners.org/cepac/model.html).

that's just stating that there is a need, not where to start :) I wouldn't have any idea on where to go to help out with those either

2) Read the computational papers on a subject you are interested; replicate the results in the papers and open source your software/pipeline; apply the method to a newer data-set.

3) Contribute to a open source informatics toolchain used for the subject (e.g., https://github.com/bigdatagenomics/adam)