How you can help

We’re looking for volunteers to help spread the word, donate materials and digitise the emerging collection. Here’s how you can help:

Donate!

First prize for us is a short clip (1-3 minutes) of something that you personally feel is part of your heritage – whether it’s a shot of the crowd at the anti-xenophobia rally that you attended or a clip of how you feel about Madiba, it’s your heritage and we want you to share it!

Second prize is a description of materials that you have (on tape etc) that have yet to be digitised. We will be arranging digitisation drives in the near future to get volunteers to help digitise the collections, but first we need to know what kinds of materials are available.

Lastly, if you know of anyone else (grandparents, friends overseas etc) who might, please contact us with details about their collection. Please note that you must own the copyright of the materials (or have written permission from the copyright holder) for them to be eligible for the collection.

If you’d like to participate, please send us an email with the following information:

Your name:

Summary of what the collection consists of (e.g. a home video – VHS – of Bree Street, Johannesburg in the 1950s):

Is it digitised and online already? (Y/N)

If it is already online, please add the URL here:

Do you own the copyright? (Y/N/unsure)

Your contact telephone number:

Your contact email address:

Help us tag open SA heritage!

We need help in tagging photographs, video and audio clips as ‘OpenSA!’ on delicious. These should only be tagged if they are in the public domain or Creative Commons licensed. Through this, we will build a directory of materials specifically related to South African heritage. This will help us later on when we start our competitions and campaigns, but it also helps people who are looking for open materials to remix and build upon.

Help spread the word!

We’re starting a meme where bloggers announce what they’re donating to the archive and then link to five other bloggers who then do the same. Whether it’s a photograph of the crowd at the anti-xenophobia rally that you attended, an audio clip of how you feel about Madiba or an old photograph of the Pietermaritzburg City Hall before the fire, it’s your heritage and we want you to share it!

The rules of the meme are as follows:

Link to your original tagger(s) and list these rules in your post.
Use the headline ‘My donation to OpenSA!’
You can either upload an image, a video, or audio clip and license it under an open content license, or you can tag something that is already open as ‘OpenSA!’ in Delicious (if you don’t know how this works, go here).
Then explain why you’ve chosen to release the specific item into the public domain/under a Creative Commons license and why you think it’s part of your heritage.
If you’re uploading your open content, please try to tag it in delicious as ‘openSA!’.
Tag five people at the end of your post by leaving their names and the links to their blogs.
Let them know they’ve been tagged.

Volunteer for Open SA! events!

We’re going to be organising a couple of get-togethers in Johannesburg (for starters) to digitise materials, discuss what we’ve found and to just celebrate. If you’d like to know when these are happening, please sign up to the open-jozi group here.