IM POOR, FUCK OFF SCAMMERS

My name is Maram, I am 25 years old from Gaza. I dreamed of a peaceful life, spending my life with my husband and my three children... but the war turned this dream into an impossible one 💔😭. We lived through this genocide with all its painful details and we are still suffering from it😭. We were so happy when the ceasefire was announced, and we returned to our homes in northern Gaza after being displaced for a year and a half in a tent in the south of the Gaza Strip. After repairing a small room in our destroyed house, we began to live there and start over. Unfortunately, the war came back, and it was even stronger than before 💔. Now, we have no shelter or source of income. We have used up all our savings during the war. I know I created my campaign very late, but that's because I have no other means to help my family 🙏. I am completely confident and hopeful that someone here will help us as much as they can and save my family in these tough circumstances 😔.

I know how painful and frustrating it is to start over from scratch, but I hope to get any amount for my family 🥺🙏.

I have to race to sign up to volunteer trips because even with dozens of spots available, people rush to devote their unpaid free time to helping the environment. these trips often fill up within hours. people care.

you will see a lot of bad news because that is the kind of news that people pay the most attention to. I know this more than you'd think from my optimism- not only do I live somewhere facing some of the most extreme ecological issues on the planet, I also spend my time studying the Bad Stuff every single day.

The US National Archives (and this may certainly apply to other countries but this post is about this specific institution) has a lot of material. And that may seem like an obvious statement, but what I mean to say here is that it has a lot of unprocessed material.

“Processing”, in the archive world, is the word we use to mean “organizing the collection materials in a way that makes sense and describing the collection so people know what’s there”. Essentially, processing a collection or material is what makes it accessible to researchers. Think about how you organize yourself or your space. Most of the time when we acquire material we get it exactly how the creator kept it, which is ranges from neat as a pin to literal garbage dump, but mostly falls into the middle area of somewhat organized but also not really. Processing gives the archivist “intellectual control” (we go through everything so we now know exactly what’s in the collection) and gives researchers something to look at that’s a lot more manageable.

But, like I said, the National Archives has a lot of material. Which at this point includes a massive backlog. So what they have done, with the advent of the internet, is turned to crowdsourcing. (Using a large group of volunteers over the internet to accomplish more than the few people who work for the archive can do, and/or using group knowledge and skills that they don’t have to their advantage. Wikipedia or any fandom wiki is an example of crowdsourcing.) This is a long process, because anything they put up has to be digitized first, and that is not as easy as it sounds. I won’t rant here, but it’s time consuming, labor intensive, and in some cases not even feasible with the material.

Anyway, the National Archives crowdsources through a program that they call “citizen archivists”. It’s something that’s free and obligationless, it’s totally voluntary and you do things like add tags to pictures, transcribe documents that are handwritten or otherwise not word-searchable, and add comments about things that are missing information or context.

The reason I bring this up is because they have divided the work into what they call “missions”, basically just categories of material to work on. They have a new one that’s just been made public (likely because they finally got the digitization completed) that is a large collection of pictures consisting of Native subjects, and they need help tagging them.

the Library of Congress has something similar- I’ve been transcribing Spanish legal documents for them