Formed in 2009, the Archive Team (not to be confused with the archive.org Archive-It Team) is a rogue archivist collective dedicated to saving copies of rapidly dying or deleted websites for the sake of history and digital heritage. The group is 100% composed of volunteers and interested parties, and has expanded into a large amount of related projects for saving online and digital history.
History is littered with hundreds of conflicts over the future of a community, group, location or business that were "resolved" when one of the parties stepped ahead and destroyed what was there. With the original point of contention destroyed, the debates would fall to the wayside. Archive Team believes that by duplicated condemned data, the conversation and debate can continue, as well as the richness and insight gained by keeping the materials. Our projects have ranged in size from a single volunteer downloading the data to a small-but-critical site, to over 100 volunteers stepping forward to acquire terabytes of user-created data to save for future generations.
The main site for Archive Team is at archiveteam.org and contains up to the date information on various projects, manifestos, plans and walkthroughs.
This collection contains the output of many Archive Team projects, both ongoing and completed. Thanks to the generous providing of disk space by the Internet Archive, multi-terabyte datasets can be made available, as well as in use by the Wayback Machine, providing a path back to lost websites and work.
Our collection has grown to the point of having sub-collections for the type of data we acquire. If you are seeking to browse the contents of these collections, the Wayback Machine is the best first stop. Otherwise, you are free to dig into the stacks to see what you may find.
The Archive Team Panic Downloads are full pulldowns of currently extant websites, meant to serve as emergency backups for needed sites that are in danger of closing, or which will be missed dearly if suddenly lost due to hard drive crashes or server failures.
ArchiveBot is an IRC bot designed to automate the archival of smaller websites (e.g. up to a few hundred thousand URLs). You give it a URL to start at, and it grabs all content under that URL, records it in a WARC, and then uploads that WARC to ArchiveTeam servers for eventual injection into the Internet Archive (or other archive sites).
To use ArchiveBot, drop by #archivebot on EFNet. To interact with ArchiveBot, you issue commands by typing it into the channel. Note you will need channel operator permissions in order to issue archiving jobs. The dashboard shows the sites being downloaded currently.
The GitHub Social Impact Team connects the social sector to the GitHub community and GitHub employees as they shape the future of technology. We pledge to provide resources for people to make lasting change—in their communities and around the world.
Chayn is an intersectional organization working to reduce domestic and gender-based violence. We’re working with them to collect insights about the social sector. Check out their Soul Medicine project and consider sponsoring their work.
Hikaya is an organization that helps nonprofits understand, define, and use metrics for better programming in resource-constrained areas. We’re working with them on a case study about their open source work. Consider sponsoring their projects.
We were a sponsor of MERL Tech DC, a conference dedicated to technology in monitoring and evaluation (M&E;). Together, we’re building tools to help M&E; professionals understand and use open source solutions.
To make sure the next generation of developers includes the most underserved communities in the world, we partnered with seven organizations to create the Tech Pipeline. We’re helping in three major ways.
Education
We help employees educate more communities about Git, GitHub, and open source.
Mentorship
We create opportunities for GitHub employees to mentor new developers and young professionals.
Community
We host events for students from under-represented communities at GitHub HQ and around the world.
Featured organizations
Learn about these organizations working with our Tech Pipeline program.
Code Tenderloin helps bring economic equity and a sense of community to the marginal populations in and around San Francisco’s Tenderloin neighborhood. We recently brought a group of aspiring developers to meet employees at GitHub HQ for mentorship and job preparation.
By providing LGBTQ+ youth with the tools to create innovative technology solutions, Maven Youth inspires a new generation to advocate for social change. We partner with Maven on events like their free Summer Tech Camp for LGBTQ+ youth.
Thousands of organizations use GitHub to build solutions for the world’s most pressing problems. We’re happy to give qualifying teams the tools they need to work on social good projects for free.