Well its that time of the year again - time to scramble for a last minute gift! Sure you could run out and get a gift card to a big box store, but why not try something a little more creative? Each of these five of these ideas will take you less than 5 minutes of your time to purchase, and you'll have a unique and thoughtful gift.
Kiva At first Kiva might look like a charity organization. You donate some money, and it goes to an individual in need. What's unique about Kiva, is that it's really a micro-loan program. Individuals in need put together a modest business proposal, and you help fund them through Kiva. The individual then builds their business, and repays the loan. You can then turn around and re-loan your money to another individual. These loans allow much needed started capital for individuals, and encourages them to continue building and prospering.They have a great video about the process. A great gift for a budding philanthropist or business minded individual.
The Humble Indie Bundle Indie games and helping charity, what's not to love? The Humble Bundle is a collection of games by independent developers who have come together to give back to the community. You can get 7 innovative games, for a price that you choose! That's right, you can pay as little or as much as you want. You can also decide how much money goes to the developers of the games, and how much goes to charity organizations. In this case, the organizations are The American Red Cross, and Child's Play. Child's Play makes donations to hospilized children in the form of games, to keep their spirits up. You can choose to buy the games for Mac, Windows, or Linux, so they make a great gift for anyone.
Bad Code Offsets Even programmers have been known to make a mistake every now and again -if you've ever used a buggy program, you know that. In a tongue and cheek nod to Carbon Offset Credits, The Alliance for Code Excellence has created Bad Code Offset Credits. There are many denominations that you can purchase SLOCs (source lines of code) that represents many different kinds of code. The Alliance maintains a list of projects that the money from the offsets will go to. All of these projects are software projects that are open and free to the community. You may have never heard of Apache or jQuery, but I guarantee you that you've used them in your web travels. Bad Code Offsets make a great gift for IT professionals and software engineers.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation In a world where technology is growing quickly, society and technology can often clash. The EFF's mission is to defend free speech rights, individual privacy, and the open-ness of the web. You can make a one time donation to the EFF in someone's name - a great gift for anyone who relies on the web for their everyday life.
The Wikimedia Foundation If you've ever used Wikpedia (and really, who hasn't?) then you have the Wikimedia Foundation to thank. It take a tremendous amount of time, energy, and money to keep the Wikimedia sites up and running. A dondation in someone's name would be a great gift for any netizen.
Local Public Radio I love public radio. From "This American Life" to "Wait Wait don't Tell Me", from "On the Media" to "A Prarie Home Companion", I love them all. I can't tell you how many times radio has gotten me through a long drive, or kept me up to speed on the day's event's. I might be a tech nerd, but public radio is an integral part of my life, and pledging money to these stations keeps them up, running, and serving you. We're blessed in Northwest Indiana to have multiple public radio stations.
A pledge to any of these stations is a great gift for anyone who listens to public radio regularly.
Well that wraps up this list of ideas, but this is still only the tip of the iceberg. There are a huge number of organizations out there doing good in the world. So if nothing on this list piques your intrest, go out and look for an organization that you can help out this holiday season.