activities for the civic geek

Activities For The Civic Geek: Support Industry Veterans

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Sometimes the people that are vital to our geeky communities hit hard times.  Rally to help them out.

We’ve all seen sad stories of people that were foundational in our geekery.  The great artist who has a tough time.  The great author who’s in a health crisis.  Many people who were vital but now forgotten having hard times.  As geeks, we can help.  These are people that made our world, our industry, our media.  When they have financial troubles, we can chip in as civic geeks.

What you can do varies by industry, industry awareness, and more, but a few things you can try:

  • Some professions have organizations to raise money for industry veterans in need.  You can always donate.
  • For organizations helping out veterans in need, some do various charity events.
  • If a famous veteran has a problem, perhaps your group, club, convention or guild can raise a fundraiser.

What you can do, who’s helping, and how you can help varies.  I’d like to see more organizations supporting veterans of geeky media, like the one below.  Then again maybe you’ll found one . . .

Resources:

Comics:

  • The Hero Initiative – Being in comics can be a tough road, and this organization helps support comics creators in need.

RPGs:

Activities For The Civic Geek: Citizen Science

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Citizen Science is the idea that we, as citizens, can and should be involved in scientific pursuits, research, and promotion.  It’s a profound idea mixing civic involvement, science, and of course pure geekery.

“Citizen Science” is a lovely term for people from all walks of life doing and helping with scientific work as citizens.  You don’t have to be a scientist to help – but you may work with them, collecting data, building tools, crunching numbers, and more.  It’s a mix of citizenship, crowdsourcing, and science.

It’s hard to sum up just what you can do as a citizen scientist, because there’s so many options.  The resources below can guide you, but a few ideas:

  • You may gather information on environmental change in your area – great for your friends, family, club, or convention to help out with.
  • Use your writing skills to transcribe rare documents and scientific information into more enduring formats – or even other languages.
  • Promote science education at your convention.
  • Use your knowledge of your local area to help with civic disaster planning based on your area’s unique challenges.

That’s just a a small idea of what you can do as a citizen scientist.  A little research will almost certainly find a project that’s right for you and your geeky interests -or your club, convention, writer’s group, and more.

If you don’t have time?  Well invite citizen science groups to your school, place of work, club, or convention so they can talk about what they do and recruit people.

As a citizen scientist you’ll help out worthy causes, learn, and make connections.  There’s really no downside to it except you only have so much time in the day.

 

Citizen Science

  • Computing
    • Code For America – An alliance of coders and citizens that innovate on technology, draft policies, and create apps to help citizenship.
  • Environment
  • Space
  • STEM
    • Citizen Science Alliance – A collaborative effort of scientists, software developers, and educators to promote and organize citizen science and citizen science projects, as well as science awareness. Their projects are tracked in Zooniverse.com.
    • Science Cheerleader – A site focusing on Cheerleaders who chose science careers, promoting science awareness, and where the former can promote the latter, all with good humor and a serious mission.
    • Scientific America’s Citizen Science Page – Scientific American’s resource for citizen scientists, listing projects and updates. A good way to find something to fit your interests.
    • SciStarter – A site to find, join, and contribute to scientific endeavors. Contains a large database of citizen science projects for you to check out.
    • Zooniverse – The Citizen Science Alliance’s website for hosting citizen science projects. A good place to go and find specific projects to get involved in.

Activities For The Civic Geek: Teaching And Workshops

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Chances are any geek has a pretty valuable skillset others would like to learn from or use – so why not get educational and teach people.

If you’re a geek you’re enthused about something, and quite likely you do something with it.  From fanfic to coding games, from cosplaying to running cons, from historical enthusiasms to your extensive film library you have developed quite a set of skills.

Of course you may also be good at stuff that may not seem particularly geeky that’s still valuable.  Your writing skills that forge both fanfic and video game reviews may also be useful for your technical writing career.  You might be well organized which is why you run your club and game clan.  Maybe you just have skills you share in a geeky setting (such as the way I talk job skills in geekdom).

You and your crew are smart and skilled in things both geeky and not. Start sharing it.

  • Teach geeky skills to people who don’t have them – how many folks would like to be a bit better at computers, use your cosplay knowledge to sew better, or enjoy learning about Japanese cooking (that you learned due to your love of anime).
  • Teach geeky skills to your fellow geeks.  I mean, we all have to start somewhere.
  • Teach skills that your fellow geeks need.  Sure there’s many budding authors and artists, but your work in PR could be what they need to know how to sell themselves.

You also have plenty of venues to do this in:

  • You could take your skills to any community center, school, or what have you.  This is great for all those geek skills others may need.
  • You can hold events at conventions or other geek events.  They’re always looking for panels and features.
  • You can do workshops and get people hands-on.  After all hands-on is one of the best ways to learn.

Best of all when you do these things, alone or as part of a team, you learn how to teach and instruct.  As you do more of it, you get better at it.  This can open up new options in lives and careers, just be useful overall – or be something you eventually do panels and training on for others . . .

  • Steve