This site is the culmination of thousands of hours of work by volunteers all over the globe. We are always seeking new volunteers to help maintain the site and add new features to help meet our mission.
Our Mission
Create a reliable, accessible database of international political prisoners to make it easier for people and organizations to engage in direct support work. From this mission, we design and build the site with the following goals in mind:
Usability – The site should be as easy to use as possible, because through use people will become directly involved in prisoner support. Usability also increases the number of people who are willing to work behind the scenes to keep the site running.
Accuracy and transparency – The information on the site should be as accurate as possible. When it is not known to be accurate, users should be notified. Our rules for what kind of content we allow should be clear and transparent to allow more time on the part of all involved to focus on our mission.
Self-sustaining – This site should be self-sustaining and should rely minimally on donations.
Exportability – The data on the site should be easy to access, export, and integrate with other sites and projects. We strive to make all data exportable for people doing similar projects.
Help Update Content
There are a number of ways you can help the site stay up to date on an ad hoc basis. You can check out the "Pages that Need Love" for ones that haven't been updated recently and see if you can locate new information. We also have a bunch of prisoners who don't have their birthday in our database if you could help with that research. Projected release dates for prisoners in the U.S. Federal system also change frequently due to accrual of 'good time,' so you can help us update those.
Volunteer Positions
Some roles we need filled are below, but if you have something extra to offer in terms of skills or abilities, please contact us and let us know. All volunteers for the site can receive an email address @prisonersolidarity.com.
If you are interested in one of these positions, please email phillyabc{at}riseup.net with information on your interest. Please include references of groups you have worked with before, examples of prior work, etc.
Volunteer Coordinator:
The job of the Volunteer Coordinator is to help us find new volunteers, coordinate the efforts of volunteers, and network with prisoner support groups. Many prisoners do not have official support groups and need somebody to keep their pages up to date. We ask prisoner support groups (ABC chapters etc) to dedicate to updating a certain number of pages for prisoners in their country in exchange for this site making maintaining their own prisoner list or spreading news internationally about prisoners in their region much easier. The volunteer coordinator networks with these groups, makes sure the pages are getting updated, and and also reaches out to individual prisoner support groups to let them know about the site and get them involved in pages for the prisoners they support. Technical expertise not required.
Site Moderator:
Site moderators are responsible for responding to abusive/spam content on the site, updating pages as needed, changing the style and format of pages, updating our guides, and working to keep everything working "behind the scenes". Experience in Python is a major plus, but we can always get you up to speed if you haven't used it before.
Site Designer/Admin:
As of spring 2020, we are rebuilding this site using Python Django. If you know some Python or what to learn, let us know! These positions require some time commitment and vouches (i.e. we want to know what other projects you've worked on before).
Beta-tester:
We are constantly working to improve the site's usability and functionality and we need your feedback to make sure those efforts are going well. Beta-testers are on-call volunteers who will be asked to try new features, report site functionality problems, etc. You do not need any technical experience, if you can find this website, you have the skills we need. When we are ready to launch a new feature, we'll send you an email with a link to a short survey or thing to try and you can choose to participate or not.