New product: Collaborator matching

Tech For Palestine is now connecting tech workers–such as programmers and designers– volunteering to help Palestine, with existing Palestinian advocacy organizations who need help.

After our launch last week, over 2000 volunteers joined our initial 40 members, all eager to help out. Hundreds of software engineers, data scientists, product managers, designers, founders, and marketers offered their help. Frankly, it was a bit overwhelming. That's a lot of people to suddenly show up to a Discord.

After a few iterations, we managed to figure things out, and now are connecting volunteers to existing organizations who need help. Some of the dozen or so external organizations leveraging the Tech for Palestine community are:

• Take Refuge, a website connecting refugees around the world with free accommodation
• Birds of Gaza, a community art project for children all over the world to craft birds in memory of each child martyred in Israel’s war on Gaza
• Genocide.vc, holding venture capital firms accountable for the genocidal statements of their partners
• No Tech For Apartheid, over 1000 Google and Amazon workers fighting against Project Nimbus
• Reverse Canary Mission, tracking celebrities who have supported the current genocide
• Raven Mission, working to ensure that the actions of those who enable this genocide are not cloaked in the veils of time.

I want to be frank–this matching is a bit of a mess. People show up, then wander off. Sometimes the excitement to help doesn't match the abilities you need. Obviously, you can't go from nothing to 2500 people in 8 days without it being a bit of a mess. But the core team is working on it, and we hope to get many (most?) of you connected with an org that needs you.

Our mission is to change how the tech industry perceives Palestine and Palestinians, to help achieve the overall liberation of Palestine. A core value of the initiative is that we are not jealous–we have the same goals as many many other organizations working towards this goal. We are extremely happy to share our resources, which in this case are tech volunteers, and connect them to help other organizations in the movement achieve their goals.

In addition, we are connecting volunteers to our official projects, as well as connecting volunteers to each other to execute on their ideas, which we call Community Experiments–over a dozen have started. We are helping incubate these ideas, intending to connect them to leaders and mentors to help shape their visions and lead to change. But more on that later.

If you need help or support from tech workers for your project, post in our #collaborator-matching forum in our Discord. If you want to help out projects working for Palestine, read those messages and volunteer.