Holiday season is nearly upon us. Donating to a charity is an alternative form of gift giving that shows you care, whilst directing your money towards helping those that need it. There are a lot of great and deserving causes you can support, and I’m certainly not going to tell you where you should donate your money.
But I’ve been thinking about the various ways in which I can support projects that I care about. There are a lot of them as it turns out. And it occurred to me that I could ask friends and family who might want to buy me a gift to donate to them instead. It’ll save me getting me getting yet another scarf, pair of socks, or (shudder) a brutalised toblerone.
One topic I’m interested in, as regular readers will know, is how we can create a sustainable commons: open data, open source, etc. So here’s a list of relevant donation options. I’m sharing it here in case you might find it useful too.
Open Source
- Donate to the Apache Foundation to support their open source community
- Donate to the Open Source Initiative, to support community building and education around open source
- Donate to the Free Software Foundation to support their advocacy around free software
Open Content & Data
- Donate to wikipedia (and there are other ways to give) and support open knowledge and variety of types of open content. Probably at least one visit a day for most of us
- Donate to the Internet Archive and help them build the digital library of the future
- Donate to MusicBrainz to support the world’s best open music database. You probably use it every day too
- Donate to OpenStreetMap to help map the world
Open Science
- Donate to the Mozilla Foundation to support all of their projects, including Mozilla Science
- Donate to the Public Library of Science to help them continue to provide peer reviewed, open access science to the public
Open Standards and Rights
- Donate to the Creative Commons to help them deliver their vision of a vibrant global commons
- Donate to the W3C to support creation of the web’s standards
- Donate to the EFF to support an open web
This isn’t meant as an exhaustive list. It’s just the organisations that immediately came to mind. Leave a comment if you’d like to suggest an addition.
Lost Boy 