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What are some global projects I can contribute to from my home?
I'll try to keep it short. I'm not satisfied with the way I'm trying to contribute to the betterment of humanity and the planet. I want to contribute to my local community, but because of political and health reasons, I can't do that.
My relevant strong points are that I can analyze, synthesize, and write well (have been praised for them in professional academic settings). But the suggestions don't have to be about this.
I've been writing things here and there for years, but I feel like they lack direction. It's just one person putting it out there with very limited reach. I feel like being part of a bigger project could help me effect change better. At the very least, it could help me feel like I'm doing something more tangible.
Do you know any other languages? Many open source projects (and some closed projects) need community contributed localizations.
Do you program? It’s easy to contribute to many projects if you can or want to learn.
You mention you are good at synthesis and writing. Even if you don’t program directly, you could maybe contribute documentation or tutorials to open source projects. Programmers are notoriously bad at documenting things themselves, so a good document writer can often be better than another programmer.
Thanks for the suggestion. I know my main language other than English. I will take take this into account.
This might not quite be in the spirit of what you're looking for as it is more passive than I think you might want, however if you've got a good computer or some extra laptops lying around you could consider contributing to volunteer computing platforms.
I've personally used Berkley's BOINC, which is a general platform that has a wide range of projects you can contribute to, from tracking asteroids to climate predictions to the study of protein structures for use in developing cures for diseases. Most projects are run by academic research institutions, and as a fun bonus there's a bit of a social aspect to it as well where you can join teams of people who all contribute to similar projects.
This is actually pretty cool. It's true that it's not what I had in mind, but it's something I can do. BOINC gained another member :)
I'd recommend taking a look at GiveWell's work: https://www.givewell.org/charities/top-charities:
I recently came across this but haven't used it personally, but you can take a look at Catchafire if you want to virtually volunteer your skills for a non-profit. The projects can be filtered by causes, skills, and duration of commitment.