After attending a protest with a friend, we started talking about accessibility in the context of activism. In particular, thinking about how attending public actions isn't an option for everyone; it's difficult enough for me and my friend due to sensory issues. But there are other ways to get involved; I did some web development work for the group organizing the protest, for example.

The problem is, a lot of folks are turned off the idea of getting involved because they have a limited view of what activism looks like. We started thinking about how you can find roles for people in activist groups they might not otherwise think they have a role in. We were inspired by this infographic by Devon Price, which introduces the concept of activist "character classes"--examples of roles folks can take in activist group that go beyond attending protests.

I decided to build a website called Not Without Help, with the goal of connecting activist groups with people who want to get involved. It's an inbox for organizers to collect contact information from folks who are interested, and where volunteers can share information about what kinds of help they can offer. I used Devon Price's activist character classes as a template for respondents to check off which roles they're interested in.

It's intended to be a replacement for tools like Google Forms, albeit with a much more limited feature set. I implemented end-to-end encryption for responses, so only the organizers can see the information people submit. I also implemented a system for access control, so that organizers can control who they authorize to view the responses, and revoke that access if necessary.

Right now, the tool is pretty simple and the feature set is fairly limited. I have some ideas for what comes next, but I need to give more thought to exactly what problems I'm trying to solve, and probably get feedback from activist groups to understand what their needs are. Some ideas I've had so far:

• Building it out into a more generic form builder, or at least allowing organizers to define their own roles not on the preset list.
• Implementing a sort of job board where organizers can opt to list their group in a central directory, and volunteers can browse groups looking for help.

I'm happy with the progress I've made so far, and I'm excited to move forward with the project and see what comes next.