Volunteers Needed

If you would like to help us with any of the tasks listed below, please contact us.

Contributors

If you want to add content to a timeline, you do not need to contact us! Just register, log in, follow the instructions, and start contributing!

Content Editors and Copyeditors

We need experienced content editors and copy editors to review submitted timeline entries. Volunteer content editors would check that each entry is accurate and properly formatted. Entries that fail to pass muster would either be fixed or sent back to their creators with comments. We encourage people with expert knowledge on specific issues—journalists, scholars, graduate students, etc—to participate in this effort. If you do not have a lot of time, do not worry. You can elect to review as few as one entry per month. If you are interested in joining this effort, please send us an email describing your qualifications.

Partnership campaign

We need help devising and implementing a strategy to create partnerships with authors, scholars, journalists, and civil society organizations. Specifically, we need one or two people to help design a networking campaign and several other volunteers to search the Internet for potential partners.

Writing

Public Relations/Newsletters - We are looking for people who would be willing to spend a few hours each month writing letters, emails, and newsletters.

Forum Moderators

We need two or three people to help bring some life to our forum and moderate it. To be eligible, you must have a verifiable history of posting high-quality content elsewhere. Prior experience as a moderator is a plus.

Foundation Research

History Commons needs help researching foundations that could potentially provide us with funding.

Web Design

We are looking for an exceptionally talented web designer to brighten up the History Commons website and make it look more professional. We would need a design for the home page, the timeline pages (view), and the project pages (view). No server-side programming skills would be required—just html, javascript, and graphic design expertise. We will take care of the task of incorporating it into existing website. If we use your design, we will include a small “this website was designed by” link at the bottom of all pages.

Multimedia

We would like to create multimedia presentations that explain the concept and significance of collaborative research, perhaps something similar to the presentations at Creative Commons.

Java and PHP Development

Java - We are also looking for experienced Java programmers to assist in the development of the website. Experience programming websites involving Java 1.5, JDO, JSP, MySql, XML and Tomcat technologies is essential, as is being able to commit enough time to the work to make any initial learning-curve worthwhile (we're not trying to be picky—we are of course only looking for volunteers prepared to work without compensation—however it's just not worth your or our time if you lack sufficient experience or time to be of use on this task).

PHP - While most of the site is in Java, we are using a few PHP open-source applications like Phorum and could use some help customizing them.

xml - We need help developing an xml schema for the mapping of entity-relationships.