Today I’m going to spend down some of my PayPal slush fund by making donations to online causes that are important to me. I do this every year, usually on a day in December (Christmas! Last chance for tax breaks! etc). Doing it in a single day makes it fun, like an event. Here’s a partial list of where I’ll be sending moolah today:
- The Wikimedia Foundation – the fine folks who bring you the advertising-free Wikipedia
- Free Software Foundation – Maintainers of GNU and the GPL, champions of free software
- Electronic Frontier Foundation – Advocates for free speech and other kinds of freedom online
- Hack Education – Audrey Watters’s excellent, ad-free, independent blog on the world of ed tech
- Thirteen – My local PBS station
- Creative Commons – The maintainers of progressive licenses for creative content
You don’t have to give to these specific causes (though you should – they are awesome!), but you should get out there and support some of the causes that you believe in. Even a couple bucks can be meaningful. ‘Tis the season!