WIKIGet Involved
ORG's activities are greatly assisted by volunteers and interns - ordinary people who care about digital rights issues and want to get involved. There are a variety of ways people can help out, through internships, volunteer work or just by doing something on our to-do list. To contact us about volunteering and intership-related opportunities, drop us a line at volunteer@openrightsgroup.org or just add yourself to our list, and we'll be in touch.
Volunteering
ORGWiki is the official wiki of the Open Rights Group, and exists to act as a database of information about the Open Rights Group, bodies we work with, bodies we work against, and digital rights issues in general. This is to serve both the Open Rights Group and its volunteers, and the population as a whole; we aim to maintain pages on important subjects written so that people can educate themselves about the issues, and other pages for our volunteers and employees to use as sources of data when campaigning on the issues which matter to us. As part of this, we need volunteers to help edit the wiki, educating the population, informing ORG's campaigners and making sure people know their rights. For more information and how to help out, see ORG Wiki:About.
A crucial element to getting a wider community involved in digital rights is our web presence - be it the ORGZine, the main ORG site or ORGWiki. Developing new sites and keeping the existing ones in shape requires a lot of skill and effort. In particular we need people experienced or willing to work with the ModX CMS platform. At the same time, we're also looking for competent people to volunteer to help sysadmin our expanding network of websites (full-scale and micro), servers and office machines. They should self-document code, work with revision systems (subversion), and not screw things up (for too long, anyhow). If you fulfil these criteria, please drop us a line!
We also need to support ORG's work financially. Small donations from individuals drive our campaigning successes. We need to reach out to more technologists and campaigners by attending more conferences and meet-ups to spread the word about the Open Rights Group, and those willing to work as Community Fundraisers are a key part of being able to do this, by raising money to fund our efforts. Alternately, if you're a blogger or writer, you can raise issues and spread the word about us and our community by writing for the Orgzine, Britain's leading open rights magazine.
Internships
Are you a student thinking ahead to the long summer months? Are you itching to contribute to an exciting and socially beneficial cause? If you fit this bill and are interested in computer science, politics, law or culture online then come and intern for Open Rights Group. Interning for ORG gives students and graduates an invaluable insight into the day-to-day running of the lobbying / campaigning profession. Your responsibilities will be tailored to your particular skills and interests. Past interns have helped develop web services that facilitate civic engagement, designed promotional and briefing literature, researched public consultation submissions - and plenty more besides.
Ideally, you will be able to work from our central London office but remote participation is also possible. We are interested in applications from both part-time and full-time candidates. You will be expected to work closely with our 5 core staff as well as the wider volunteer community.
You can find a link to the internships we offer, and their job descriptions, here.