Asking for your support: Tiptree Award & Conservancy

This year, I want to bring my readers' attention to two underappreciated charities. One is the James Tiptree, Jr. Literary Award, which encourages the exploration & expansion of gender -- you may have seen me entertain scifi/fantasy fans at conventions as the charity auctioneer raising money for the Tiptree Award. (I'm also on its board, or "Motherboard," as of this year.) I recently wrote about what an award does, and the reflections I've seen from winners of the Tiptree Awards and Fellowships tell me those honors are doing the job -- encouraging creators and fans to expand how we imagine gender. I'm one of the people matching donations to the Tiptree Award right now; all donations made from now through the end of the year will be matched, up to USD $2400 -- if people match that whole amount, that'll cover more than half the Tiptree Award's annual budget, which would be great.

And second, the Software Freedom Conservancy, a nonprofit that helps free and open source software projects. They help programmers give away their work for free. The Conservancy is a nonprofit umbrella (a fiscal sponsor), helping projects like Git, homebrew, Wine, Selenium, and others by taking care of legal and financial paperwork on their behalf. They're also the institutional home of Outreachy, which gives underindexed people in tech paid apprenticeship-style internships to help them start their open source software careers. And they make sure big companies actually follow the rules, legally, so everyone can benefit the same from the openness of open source. I go into what they do in this essay (video version). Right now, they have a challenge match going: "All donations up to [USD] $75,000 will be matched dollar for dollar until January 15." Conservancy's part of the unsung infrastructure of inclusivity and fairness in open source, and I hope those of you who can will chip in a bit.