Join me in creating an open global charity search engine
Charities are a means for regular people to outsource their good intentions and transform them into good deeds. The question is, what charity is best suited for the job? Let’s build a tool for this purpose. I made a first step and invite you to join!
Do we really need another platform?
There are many, many, many websites that seemingly aim for the same thing. But the way I see it, they are not fully aligned with the simple goal I stated. If there is one, please let me know.
How it’s different:
- No other goals or conflicts of interests. Most platforms receive money from sponsors that have a stake in a certain message.
- Global. The base country of a charity is less interesting than the area it operates in, and if it’s competent and trustworthy.
I propose a global neutral platform with core information and (links to) all relevant contextual information to help you decide what charities you can trust to outsource your good intentions.
Why bother?
Value for user: A quicker, simpler and better way to find the charities best suited to implement their good intentions.
Value for the world: A world where people can better search and assess charities for themselves, means:
- Charities can spend less resources on advertisements and more on their causes.
- Less resources for charities and bad actors that don’t deserve it.
- A positive feedback loop that ultimately (in a perfect world) grows the trust of the sector as a whole, growing the group of people who participate.
- The ultimate goal; a structurally improved world.
Value for me: The joy of creating something of value, and a better understanding of certain technologies.
How?
The tasks are roughly:
- Gather available data on charities around the world
- Transform that data to a unified form, usable by a single interface.
- The software to provide access to this information.
The software to gather, transform and present the information is open source and can be found over here on Github:
Open source, with hardly any running responsibilities
In order for it to be a viable open source project, it must be valuable from the start. Even though it’s just me who is working on it.
My side-projects (juliushuijnk.nl) are all aimed to be manageable by myself from the start, and have the potential to grow into having a big impact.
Since my time allocation comes in bursts of a couple of months, it should sustain without hardly any running responsibilities. This requires:
- No moderation.
- As much automation as possible to incorporate more data.
- Great documentation.
- A simple structure and interface.
- Cheap to run.
Open data
It must be based on open data, with links to existing platforms because:
- No moderation required, no legal responsibilities.
- It needs to be 100% neutral.
- I don’t want to create yet another burden on charities to provide information to a platform.
Many governments provide data on charities. The initial plan is to provide a unified interface to the absolute core information (name, address, etc) and link to external websites.
The current status
You can stay up to date with the current status on Twitter.
The search engine holds charities from 6 countries and you can filter by category for 3 of those countries. Each result provides a link to a platform with more detailed information.
Third iteration
My first attempt at this general goal was back in 2006 under the name Helpalot. In 2016 I made a second attempt, and November 2019 I started this third iteration. Each time the concept became simpler and more streamlined.
Paying the bills
Search engine hosting with mostly text is not all that expensive, I can foot the bill while it lacks any significant traffic. If it will suffer from success, I’ll make a new plan.
The current plan is to assume a hosting provider would be willing to provide free hosting. Currently the demonstrator is hosted at Digital Ocean, so it would be easiest if they would be willing to partner.
How you can help
Would you like to see this work? Perhaps you can help:
- Help find good sources for each country
- Suggest code or features to improve the search engine
- Share with people that might be able to help
At moment this has very much been a solo project. I’d love to learn for who Charitius.org can be valuable in its current somewhat limited form and how it can be improved for that.
Again, the code on GitHub, including instructions on how to build the project yourself and run locally or on a server:
Feedback is much appreciated!
