Comments on: Should my money go to Wikipedia?

Question: Should my money go to Wikipedia?

zscore — Sun, 28 Oct 2012 09:14:18 -0800

I'd like to donate some money to a charity. Is there a worthier techno-cause than Wikipedia?

By: yclipse

yclipse — Sun, 28 Oct 2012 09:16:16 -0800

For lawyers, there is Cornell's Legal Information Institute.

By: Salvor Hardin

Salvor Hardin — Sun, 28 Oct 2012 09:19:52 -0800

If you're looking for a technology-related organization, I think the Electronic Freedom Foundation does good work.

By: erst

erst — Sun, 28 Oct 2012 09:21:33 -0800

I've always felt that the Electronic Frontier Foundation is a very worthy cause. How to Help.

By: DarlingBri

DarlingBri — Sun, 28 Oct 2012 09:21:52 -0800

Yes. I think of the EFF as the ACLU of the Internet. They fight the good fight, over and over, and are on the very short list of organisations to whom we give reliably every year (though some years more than others!)

By: Salvor Hardin

Salvor Hardin — Sun, 28 Oct 2012 09:26:42 -0800

Whoops, make that Electronic Frontier Foundation. Always make that mistake.

By: sexyrobot

sexyrobot — Sun, 28 Oct 2012 09:28:17 -0800

EFF, ftw!

By: holgate

holgate — Sun, 28 Oct 2012 09:30:59 -0800

EFF or CPJ, whose remit has broadened to cover bloggers and social media users who operate at tremendous personal risk.

By: misterbrandt

misterbrandt — Sun, 28 Oct 2012 09:33:14 -0800

The Internet Archive?

By: zscore

zscore — Sun, 28 Oct 2012 09:44:00 -0800

I really like the EFF idea, and it seems that MeFi likes it a lot too. Thanks so much for the input everyone! I'm heading off to subscribe right after I post this!

By: jessamyn

jessamyn — Sun, 28 Oct 2012 10:56:37 -0800

I have been a frequent contributor to EFF and I think their work is worthwhile. Just so you know, they will deluge you with an astonishing amount of paper mail if you give them a postal address where they can contact you. It took a while for me to get them to stop doing this, so you might want to build that in to your arrangement with them up front. I'm also a big fan of EPIC, the electronic privacy information center.

By: pla

pla — Sun, 28 Oct 2012 11:49:54 -0800

N'thing EFF. One of the ONLY charities to which I have ever given money (rather than time).

By: southof40

southof40 — Sun, 28 Oct 2012 13:46:35 -0800

"Common Crawl" is a non-profit foundation who are building and maintaining an open crawl of the web for the purposes of "innovation, education and research"

I have donated to "Common Crawl" because I think the information held in the web is too important to have solely in the hands of private corporations and because I believe it will provide a platform for new private enterprises to start in a field which has high barriers to entry.

http://commoncrawl.org/our-work/donate/

Vim (vim.org) is powerful text editor used by many programmers working in open-source software. It's distributed freely but the developer requests donations to help an orphanage in Uganda (see "Vim's License" for details and how to donate).

I use Vim daily and I have donated. It's not a direct "technology" contribution but contributions motivate the author of Vim and so a donation supports both the development of an important Programming Editor and the less fortunate children of Uganda.

By: cthuljew

cthuljew — Mon, 29 Oct 2012 01:46:30 -0800

The Free Software Foundation might be one to consider if your techy impulses go in that direction.

By: Busy Old Fool

Busy Old Fool — Mon, 29 Oct 2012 05:28:10 -0800

The EFF is indeed a fine organisation, but if you're looking for additional avenues, you might like to consider the authors of free or libre software that you use. This particularly applies to smaller or less-glamorous projects, which are often overlooked in the rush to donate to big names like Mozilla.

By: anon4now

anon4now — Mon, 29 Oct 2012 05:42:34 -0800

All of these charities are worthy, but their good work may be moot if we get hit by a large enough asteroid. Fortunately the b612 foundation is trying to prevent that from happening.
from the site: B612 Sentinel aims to build, launch, and operate the world's first privately funded deep space telescope to create the first comprehensive dynamic map of our inner solar system, identifying the current and future locations and trajectories of Earth crossing asteroids. To date, only about one percent of the nearly 1 million asteroids that could potentially hit Earth with devastating consequences have been observed and tracked. In just the first few weeks of operation, Sentinel will surpass this total, and during the first five years of operation, will discover 50 times more near-Earth asteroids than have been found by all other telescopes throughout history combined. Ball Aerospace will design and build the Sentinel Space Telescope, with the same expert team that built the Spitzer and Kepler Space Telescopes. Sentinel will launch in 2017-2018. Through a Space Act Agreement with NASA, data will be collected and sent back to Earth via NASA's Deep Space Network, which also will be used for tracking and navigation.