History Commons

Volunteering

If you'd like to be part of the History Commons, and join what we consider to be one of the best groups of information activists and historical citizen journalists in existence, please contact us. Information about the different roles you can play is below.

Editors/ 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! You can create an account using this form.

• Write for the Commons and be a part of documenting history!

Content Editors and Copyeditors

We pride ourselves on the quality of our material. To achieve this high standard, we put everything we publish through what we call our peer review process. Basically, we relentlessly edit everything we publish both for content (i.e. the information is as accurate as we can make it, and correctly reflects the source material) and for proper spelling, grammar, formatting, and organization. We are actively seeking people with knowledge on specific issues--journalists, scholars, graduate students, etc--to participate in this effort. If you do not have a lot of time, don't worry. You can elect to review as few as one entry per month. If you'd like to be part of our peer review panel, please send us an email describing your qualifications.

• Help ensure the History Commons has the highest quality content!

Partnership campaign

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

• Help the History Commons find new partners!

Writing

Right now, our main sources of outreach are through our two blogs--the site blog and the contributors' blog--and our weekly e-mail updates. We'd love to have your help in maintaining the blog and writing the newsletters. We'd also love to create History Commons pages on MySpace, Facebook, and other social networking outlets. Can you help us with this?

• Help us reach a larger and more diverse community!

Foundation Research

Like everyone else, we need funding to survive and grow. We urgently need someone to help research foundations that might provide us with grants or other funding.

• Help get the Commons some much-needed funding!

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.

• Get involved in creating multimedia for the Commons!

Java and PHP Development

Java--We are also looking for experienced Java programmers to assist in the development of the website and revamp the Web application. 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, but we do need people who have some experience with these programming languages.

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

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

• Help revamp the History Commons Web application!