We want to kick off dozens of projects to address injustice in Palestine, or to damage Israeli influence in the US and around the world, to support cultural, academic, and economic boycotts, divestment and sanctions. Ultimately we want each of these projects to build a scaled up, high impact, self-sustaining, long-term initiative.
We have potential leaders, and we have volunteers. The most successful aspects of both leaders and volunteers are that they are smart, talented, and they consistently show up and do the work, whether that work is doing research, writing, coding, or organizing.
The projects below are areas that we would like projects to be started, and they can be incubated inside the Tech for Palestine incubator.
To apply, select “Apply for the T4P Incubator” from the Tech for Palestine Get Involved page.
Existing boycott apps like NoThanks, Boycat, Ethicly, and Disoccupied, have shared their datasets of brands to boycott with Tech for Palestine. These brands can be used to build existing boycott apps, but they can also be brought to dozens of novel and highly effective uses. We need a team to enable that. Can we partner with grocery chains, restaurants, fast food chains, or hotels, to remove these brands from their purchasing? Perhaps these can feed into tariff policies for countries that support Palestine and sanction Israel, like the Maldives or Malaysia. Or turned into APIs to support new technical use cases not yet imagined.
We built Github badges to advocate for Palestine in December. Alas, the initiative lost steam. We need someone who understands the open source ecosystem to pick this back up. Badges on GitHub repos may seem like a small thing, but this small act can allow workers to express their opinions in a low-key way, that raises the baseline of advocacy. By raising the baseline, workers can see solidarity around Palestine everywhere they code, leading to greater potential for advocacy in their companies. The badges need technical work, but more than anything they need sales and developer advocates / developer relations folks to work with individuals and coding or open source influencers to get these on their github, stackoverflow, dev.to, and other related sites.
Our Jobs for Palestinians page lists a number of initiatives to help hire Palestinians in the West Bank, who have escaped from Gaza, or those in the diaspora. We would like to help support them further. Palestinians are among the most educated in the world, with a huge density of great coders in particular. Can we support existing efforts by Manara, TAP, MENAAlliances, and others to find jobs? In particular, can we leverage a large volume of volunteers to build sales processes that go beyond small-budget marketing initiatives? Join Apricot
Profile-pic maker has been used by thousands to create avatars with the Palestinian flag, used to display solidarity with Palestine. However, the project has not been significantly worked on, and never received a real marketing push beyond the first launch. We need to make it easier to use on social media sites, and build tools and documentation to allow people to use the avatar for everything. Most of all, we need to help influencers who wish to use these in order to bring them to the masses.
An early T4P project was a banner to add to your website. It needs work from a technical front to make it more usable, and it especially needs someone to do extensive user discovery and early user advocacy to get it on as many websites, blogs, etc, as possible.