Hi. I started a new GitHub organization and added a repo to it:

https://github.com/Protect-Children-...-From-Violence

On the repo settings, I enabled it to be a public template repo, so it can either be forked or be recreated under anyone's account as a detached project.

If you'd like to be invited to the org, just let me know here what your GitHub username is. Joining the org has no practical purpose... unless you set your visibility to "public" to help display how many people are interested in the "project".

If anyone is wondering, at this time I don't actually have any code planned for the repository.

Get that planned, and get a discussion going. Otherwise, what's the point?

You're attempting to use a source code and project management platform as a petition tool, for a problem that is entirely unrelated to software.

Are you unaware of the numerous websites that are actually dedicated to petitioning and that have a far greater reach?

A software source-code repository will never "protect" anyone from anything. While it is noble to want to protect children from harm, you need to put your noble efforts into something – probably, an already-existing something – that will actually do some good.

People already use GitHub for things that are entirely unrelated to software.

Awesome Sci-fi (3.3k stars)

mental health resources (13 stars)

No Code (52.7k stars)

Though that last one is code-related, lol, it could just as easily be a website instead of it being in a GitHub repo.

Yes, I'm aware there are organizations and petition sites that I can also participate in (after I research a bit, since I don't want to get too involved with an organization that promotes a route I don't agree with or am strongly against) and that I'm not limited to just this one thing.

I don't expect this little idea of mine to have some huge earth-shattering impact. It's just an idea I had that's loosely based on ideas other people have had first; in the hopes (or maybe unrealistic expectations) that it might give people other ideas that would add a drop in the bucket to remind lawmakers, community leaders, members, organizations to sit down at a table to start discussing the problem; to not forget about it between school shootings or when there's nothing in the news about a child getting drugged, beaten, raped, or killed by a parent or stranger.

Hmmm... maybe I should edit that and add it to the README. Probably would make it more clear about what the repo is about...

I've updated the README to make things hopefully a bit more clear and potentially helpful.

https://github.com/Protect-Children-...a97769c0bc5965

and then another patch to fix the grammer in the previous commit

https://github.com/Protect-Children-...9b5c79e3589596

Thanks for the feedback so far.

The last line mentions a logo and images. What logo and images?

EDIT: Oh, here:

https://github.com/Protect-Children-From-Violence

Thanks dugan. I tried to make that a bit clearer in this commit.

Are you suggesting that if I don't join your org I'm not interested in protecting children from violence?
Are you suggesting that if I do join your org I'm somehow protecting children from violence?

lol, no, not all. I had no intention of even subtly implying that. Thanks for checking with me though.

What I meant here specifically is that on GitHub organizations, by default, members are set to "private". Which means their membership won't show up on the org home page or the user's profile. When set to public, more people show up as having joined the org. It doesn't indicate which repos a user has contributed to, or if they have not contributed to anything. So it's just more a "symbolic" thing. Or maybe "symbolic" is the wrong word. It just shows the person has accepted the invitation to join, and has chosen to make their membership public.

When I put "project" in quotes, what I meant by that specifically was that it's not a traditional project, because there's no code.

What's it for then?

Just that? How does that protect children from violence?

That's a real problem nowadays. People have got it into their heads that clicking on some box in a petition or registering on some website actually does something and they think, "There! That's my good deed for the day."

I'm always getting emails from change.org. I read them and, if it's actually something the UK government can do and are likely to do if there's a groundswell of public support, and it's something that I agree with, then I will sign. But all too often it's something going on abroad where there isn't a snowball's chance in hell that this petition will do any good at all.

Do you remember when those Nigerian schoolgirls were captured by Boko Haram? And everybody tweeted, "Send back our girls!" Thousands of them! And of course it made no difference at all except to make them all look like idiots. Why do people confuse online with the real world?

Pointless posturing as a substitute for actual action.

"Look! My Facebook profile picture proves that I'm all for Good Thing and vehemently opposed to Bad Thing! That means I'm a virtuous person, and I get to denounce anyone not partaking in this performative routine as <something horrible>!"
I also remember "Kony 2012." Same story.Online "activism" is certainly easier than making a genuine effort. Perhaps it's a way to mask the fact that in reality, like most people, these activists are powerless to effect any meaningful change.

Or perhaps it's just laziness, and being disconnected from reality due to online culture.

What I find alarming is that this kind of behaviour is being actively encouraged in institutions of learning.

I'm not really sure how serious the last two posts were. They seemed to consist of complaints about people posting online about real-world problems. But the posters were posting online about it?

Indeed. Because, you see, there's a slight difference between discussing a real-world problem in an online forum, and believing that merely posting in online forums somehow equates to participating in solving a real-world problem.