Coming up to Christmas I generally make some small donations. Some of these I ask for as Christmas gifts because I’m old and basically have very basic wants and needs so I’m hard to buy for.
Curious to hear if / what others do.
I’ve expanded my annual list to include:
- Wikipedia
- Lemmy.world (my home instance)
- Mozilla (I’m not happy with how they spend their money necessarily but I’m very thankful to have Firefox)
- Signal messenger
- A few Ukrainian things (u24.gov.ua is the official site if this is your thing but there’s a great lady on Reddit I give to occasionally too)
- The guardian (I read so many articles from there linked on here that I feel like I should and I really appreciate the lack of paywall and easy cookie rejection but never use the site logged in)
Local all children’s hospital and khan academy
I’m a tech guy but also vegan and hate that I probably don’t do much for animals so:
- Direct Action Everywhere
- Sea Shepherd
I like them because both kind of kick ass at what they do.
I’d like to donate to the Humane Society but the local one is drowning in cash so I’d rather find one somewhere in the sticks (my hometown?) and donate to them.
Eden Reforestation Project
So every year I go donate Blood, since I’m Bloodtype 0. Aside froom that there are these:
- KDE
- FDroid
- Tutanota (Yes you can donate)
- Yet Zio (yet-calc App)
- My favourite Artist in Music
- A political Party which stands for Privacy
- EFF
- Tor
Thanks for posting this! It’s a nice reminder to support some of the organizations who’s products I enjoy.
Currently I only donate to give directly
I donate to my local food bank. I worked in their hydroponics garden a few years ago and saw how much work goes into providing food for the needy. They need all the help they can get.
I also donate time and energy and a bit of money on a specific horse at the stables I volunteer at. She’s an old mare with an owner who doesn’t give a shit about her. Nobody really does anything with her other than me and another person, and that other person only lets her out to graze. I exercise the horse, groom her, give her lots of attention, and I got her a winter blanket recently.
Internet Archive Duplicati (FOSS backup software)
- various other small open source projects
I have this fun strategy, I’ll save my charity money until there is a public call for action, then I dump a larger sum all at once.
For instance my work during covid set up a (money only) drive for a food bank that corporate would match. My bosses donated 200 a piece, until they noticed that I donated 1000, then they all found it in their hearts to donate 1000 too. Turned that 1000 bucks into about 8000.
I do have some reoccurring and misc donations.
used to donate to the Blender foundation to support development, but I’m holding off till I am in a better place financially to resume my donation. Same goes for amnesty, mediapart and acf
Neither are perfect organisations but both are trying to help people in desperate situations.
From what I’ve heard about Wikipedia’s finances they’re set for the foreseeäble and my money would be better used elsewhere.
Here’s why knowing the above i still donate to wikipedia.
Because we don’t want them to be in a position where they take money with strings attached. Imo its good for them to be reminded they serve the public first and foremost.
Here’s their audit report. 59.8% of their expenses are in executive salaries, a total of $107,793,960 this year. They list internet hosting as 1.7% of their expenses at $3,116,445.
That salary number is all ~700 employees, not just “executives”. That averages to about 150k apiece, not unreasonable for what is probably mostly tech workers.
The total for just the executives is $88million. Leaving $19million for the 700 employees, or $27,000 each. You are donating to executives.
Edit: whoops, it’s total salary in 2021, I misread
The actual total in your own link was 5.2 million for executives. The 88 million is, again, the entire salary base just in 2021. Assuming they still had 700 employees (which is a current figure, not 3 years ago) that’s still about 120k apiece for everyone else.
I can’t tell if you’re just being disingenuous or you really can’t read your own sources…
You’re right. It’s not just executives. I believed the criticism was over inflating executive salaries, but it is indeed all salaries. Wikimedia operated with a total salary of $26million in 2014 but now has salaries totalling $107million. Quadrupling their salaries in 10 years with little explanation. You’re assuming it goes to IT infrastructure workers, but they don’t explain where it actually goes.
Good lord these numbers are ludicrous
Good find.
Money
- My local NPR station
- InRangeTV
Time
- Wikipedia
I don’t have a lot to give. If I did, I would also include:
- Linux Mint
- GIMP
- Darktable
- Inkscape
- Open Medicine Foundation
- Election Science
- LibreOffice
- zirk.us
- midwest.social
- Strong Towns
tor project
I log all my donations so I have a list to copy-paste. Some of them I cannot donate to anymore (e.g.: Linux Mint) because they use PayPal which shadow-banned me. Perhaps because I kept using virtual single-use cards, and using like 50 different cards may look suspicious. But anyway, fuck PayPal.
So, the list with amounts removed (they’re too low):
Linux Mint
TeamSeas
Manjaro
OpenCollective tips
Tor Project
Internet Archive (archive.org)
The Document Foundation (LibreOffice)
Arch Linux
KDE
Mozilla
F-Droid
Termux
db0 Lemmy instance (lemmy.dbzer0.com)
Arne Schwabe (dev of Android OVPN client)
Deluan Quintao (dev of Navidrome server)
Arty Bishop (dev of Look4Sat)
sc07 (Fediverse Canvas creator)
IPcko
Markus Fisch (dev of Binary Eye)
VideoLAN
ochranma.sk
Meshtastic
Kiwix
Municia pre Ukrajinu
FFmpeg
IzzyOnDroid
LemmyThat is just a full list of every place I ever donated to. I couldn’t afford for them to be recurring.
Some of them you probably won’t know as they’re only relevant in my country (Slovakia). I’ll try to quickly describe them, I have a long day tomorrow and only 5 hours left to sleep (and it’s shortening).
IPcko - Mostly a suicide helpline, but they do a lot more too. Constantly underfunded and this year the government cut their budget even more. They provide help over phone, chat and e-mail, but also have teams that can go meet the person, physical offices (“Káčko”) across the country where you can speak to a therapist if you’re doing too bad (for free) and some more stuff like clubs where people can meet and (try to) have fun… I am too tired to name all, sorry.
ochranma.sk - Part of INHOPE network. Up until recently we had no way to report CSAM (this was started in 2022), and in 2018 and 2019 we had the second (to Netherlands) highest count of known occurrences of CSAM sharing, even surpassing USA and Russia. Mind you, we have a population of 5.5 million…
Municia pre Ukrajinu - “If not the government, then us” - Money to fund purchase of ammunition for Ukraine in cooperation with Czech Republic (our government refused to help Ukraine, thus the slogan)Edit: That info is from mind mind, I need sleep. May not be accurate.
