As most of you probably already know, the Republic of Haiti has been hit by a catastrophic earthquake. Please donate to the organizations which are trying to help. The online donation has been proven a great success – so good to see the bright side of globalization (speaking of online – it is an interesting example of how offline events can be observed online – an other example being the Google flu-trends). Below you will find a compilation of reputable information sources, which is important, since there are always a lot of scams around important events like this.

Important! Most of the information is rather specific to the USA and most of them presuppose credit-cards. If you live outside of North-America and have PayPal account, I would recommend donating to the Haiti Earthquake Children in Emergency Fund. You can get a list of ways you can donate via PayPal/eBay on their blog.

• Doing the Right Thing from the SANS diary – it gives a couple of very good advices. It also specifically lists the following organizations:
  • CARE
  • The International Red Cross
  • Doctors Without Borders
• If you have a Google Checkout account, you can donate to CARE or UNICEF using it. The Google crisis response webpage also lists a lot of trustworthy organizations which accept your donation and SMS numbers (valid in the USA only!) which can be used for donation. They also offer free calls to Haiti trough Google Voice
• Here are a couple of great tips from the CERIAS blog (written by professor Spafford) to help you avoid being scammed:
  

  • Do not enter any information at a Web page that pops up unexpectedly when you visit some other site.
  • Never click on a Web site address (URL) in e-mail sent to you; it may look official, but most will be pointers to fraud or attack sites.
  • Don’t assume that every Web address returned by a search engine, such as Google or Bing, is a legitimate organization.
  • Do not respond to e-mail requesting donations or making a special offer (such as asking you to hold their assets while Haiti rebuilds).
  • Do not reveal any personal or financial information during a phone call you did not dial yourself.
  • If a friend forwards a URL, phone number or e-mail, don’t trust it until you check its validity. Your friend may have been scammed first.

• A similar article on the Microsoft website: How to avoid online donation scams
• If you are from Canada, here are a couple of resources (via Security Balance):
  
  

  RED CROSS: www.redcross.ca
  WORLD VISION CANADA: www.worldvision.ca
  UNICEF: www.unicef.ca
  SALVATION ARMY: www.salvationarmy.ca
  MÉDECINS SANS FRONTIÈRES: www.msf.ca

• Many community websites also include a suggestion to donate (for example reddit.com or oneforty) and you can be reasonably sure about their recommendation if you’ve been using the site for some time (then again, it never hurts to double-check).

Picture taken from rbrwr’s photostream with permission.

• There is an auction going on on eBay for a very rare userfriendly.org T-shirt. All the proceedings will be donated to cancer research (there is 1 day and 8 hours remaining as of this moment)
• Buy Bad Code Offsets. 100% of the money will be donated to open source projects
• Most of the “free” services on the Internet accept donations: go donate to your favorite open-source project / podcast.

When we share, we all get richer. (ok, this is not mathematically exact, but it sure sounds nice, doesn’t it?)

Update: here are a couple more projects/organizations you should consider donating to:

• The EFF – Electronic Frontier Foundation: “the leading civil liberties group defending your rights in the digital world.”
• The SFLC – The Software Freedom Law Center: “We provide legal representation and other law-related services to protect and advance Free, Libre and Open Source Software (FLOSS)”. Also, you should check out their podcast which is always full with interesting information.
• Wikileaks: “The Sunshine Press (WikiLeaks) is an non-profit organization funded by human rights campaigners, investigative journalists, technologists and the general public. Through your support we have exposed significant injustice around the world—successfully fighting off over 100 legal attacks in the process.”
• OpenStreetMap: “The Free Wiki World Map” AKA the community created and owned map of the entire world.

Picture taken from Mickael Casol’s photostream with permission.