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Comment by mustuhfa | Hacker News Reader

Having worked closely with GSG for the last few years and done 2 trips there to mentor and host workshops, I would encourage anybody who has the time and interest in sharing their knowledge to reach out to them and help them. As the saying goes that constraint breeds creativity, I have never meet a more energetic, enthusiastic bunch of people who just want to make themselves useful and build something that they can be proud of while helping themselves. As unfortunate as their situation is, it does not stop them or the GSG crew and I believe that one day in the future, this effort will have laid the foundations for a vibrant and impactful engineering community. If anyone has any questions, please ask away and I can answer.

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I could see myself doing this a few years from now. Does a Gaza stamp in your passport limit someone's entry into other countries? (eg USA)

In Germany you can have a second pass just for that purpose. It costs more though.

Yeah, the cost of an additional passport.

What I meant was that it costs more then if you get a first one new.

What? The price of a default passport in Germany is always the same. 60€ for 32 pages.

I see this recommendation quite often and wonder if you get in trouble sooner or later, at least if you want to travel to the US. I would think the purpose of a passport is a single identification with a track record. Everything else is cheating. Not?

That's rather part of the point. Many of the countries that offer a second passport believe in freer travel than some destination countries might.

Sure it is but let's be honest here, a terrorist will find a way and most of those people who suffer under this mad apparatus of fear are normal people. You just need a way to bypass this madness for the sake of reality.

Americans, but not Canadians, can also have a second passport if they request it from the state department. Commonly used for people who need to travel to Israel and have Israeli stamps/visas in their passport, but also travel to arab boycott countries for business.

You do not get a stamp in your passport from either the Palestinian territories (including Gaza) or from Israel. You will get a piece of paper rather as your stamp which you need to keep with you and show upon exit. So no repercussions from entry.

What kind of help do they require? I'd like to help but actually travelling to Gaza and risk getting stuck there is a bit outside of my comfort zone.

Be more precise. What kinda help they need? I aint got money, are they still enthusiatic about taking non-monetary help? Or is the help in such case simply reduced to "well contact them and ask them if they need anything" (in this case I can tell you their answer even without bothering to email them: "nah, we only need money bruh")?

I assure you that I dont have nothing against Gaza and its inhabitants, what irritates me is that you encourage to help them, yet you use the language so vague that it sounds more like an advertisement of their "future vibrant community" (yea, without actual drinking water and severe overpopulation, but with computers, sure, sounds plausible), without any clearly pronounced areas where they need help, except of money of course.

I would assume the GP means "to mentor and host workshops".

In some cases offering money _is_ the best way to offer support. When goods are donated they're often not what's actually needed, or not in the proportions required. Planet Money covered this in an episode: https://www.npr.org/2015/11/27/457565052/food-banks-pickle-g... (transcript rather than episode link). This relates to food banks, but it also affects other organizations: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/nov/03/aid-workers-at... .

If you can't offer that support then I suspect that spreading the word about these projects is the next best thing.

Edited to add additional links, tidy up language.

Mentors go there from all aspects. From engineering to marketing to design. I come from a technical background, and on the first instance I did a presentation but found that it was not as useful as I had hoped. But I noticed a lack of fundamental knowledge around concepts and tech that we use on a daily basis (e.g no monitoring and a lot of manual work being done). Second time I went, I held a 3 day continuous delivery workshop introducing them to concepts like CI, CD and testing. This enabled them to deploy a simple hellow world server through a pipeline with monitoring. The feedback was that the workshop was what they needed.

If you are interested to find out more, I would suggest that you reach out to them and ask them. They have a number of initiatives (e.g coding bootcamps) and its best to understand what they have coming up and where your skills could fit in. Money no doubt would help the GSG organisation but honestly, if you can, I would go there and help on the ground. They need technical mentors more than ever.

We've banned this account for nationalistic flamewar, or whatever kind of flamewar this is, as well as for https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18128852.

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