Help Pakistan (original) (raw)
They are taking offers and opening up for auctioning later tonight/tomorrow I believe. Please go and participate however you can. There is also a list of agencies/resources/charities here.
Here are some aerial images that really put the extent of the disaster into perspective. Let's all do what we can.
(somewhat emotional) announcement
January 26th, 2011
I know I've fallen very behind with respect to the upkeep of this place but I am hoping that by now, things should more or less have been tied up for round 1. If there are any concerns or problems that anyone feels should be addressed, I would appreciate it if you could comment here or leave me a PM. I've sent out some more emails and messages regarding pinch-hits again so hopefully people haven't forgotten about them. I am very sorry that some things may still have not been sorted out, even so many months down the road, or been done as efficiently as possible but we have been trying our best to make sure that everyone who won a bid got something written in return and that all the tallying was done as systematically as possible.
I have to also mention that while I will try my absolute best to ensure all loose ends for round 1 are tied up, I personally will not be able to organize future rounds or continue to officially maintain this community. Other mods are welcome to go ahead and make the choices they like but RL matters will not give me as much time as I had last fall to organize something of that size again. I apologize as I know some of us had high hopes (myself included) of future auction rounds and more activity on this community. Of course, this is not to say that they may not happen. I just know that I will no longer be able to play a part in putting them together. I should add that if anyone is interested in maintaining or modding or has any ideas on where we can go from here, I would be happy to give you access to the community so that maybe we can keep going in our efforts one way or another.
As I leave 
help_pakistan, I hope you also keep in mind that help is still needed for recovery and development in Pakistan and in many other areas that have been affected by disasters worldwide. On that note, I would like to encourage participation in helpbrazil2011, a fandom auction for the floods in Brazil.
Regarding our Round 1, we raised somewhere around 24 000 (twenty-four thousand) USD, which comes to about 2 million Pakistani Rupees, in total for the floods in Pakistan, and it is an accomplishment that we should all be very proud of. I would like to say that I am so, so grateful for all of you and your participation, all the co-mods and volunteers, the offerers and bidders and everyone who helped spread the word. I want to thank you for your kindness and for your willingness to help. It was an experience I won't forget and one that was a great pleasure to be a part of. When I started this community, I had never imagined that it would garner such a response but seeing everyone come together like this, and with a response of such magnitude, meant more to me than I can say.
Finally, I have never wanted it to be about me at all but I will say just this once that this was a disaster that literally hit home for me and what you all have done here has, at times, moved me to tears. It has reinforced so much of my hope and optimism about what we can do to help when things go wrong because we can and we have. In sum, I can't say much else other than a very heartfelt thank you. So thank you.
Deadline reminders and the post where we try to keep track of things
October 11th, 2010
So the official deadline for the offerings to be completed was October 1st but because we haven't been the most organized folks ourselves and we understand that it's been a bit of a chaotic process for everyone to get a hold of each other, we're letting people take a little more time in getting their promised offerings done. That said, unless you and your winning bidders are informed that you will be needing more time for your projects, we are requesting that everyone can get their materials done/sent off by November 1st at the latest.
Also, at the very least, you should most definitely be in touch with your winning bidder or offerer by now or have let the mods know by email or the questions post if you are no longer participating so we can take the neccesary steps on our end.
We understand that there is no way to enforce our rules and deadlines but we ask that you please be respectful of the offerers/winners you're working with and please deliver on your end of things and not keep them in the dark. This entire auction is working on the honour policy and a) we understand and appreciate the fact that you are all doing this out of generosity and b) there really is no way to track anyone down on the internet. Still, we ask that you be considerate of each other and the fact that everyone has already given or is willing to give something, whether it is their time or talent or money, for a very important cause.
As we're getting lots of emails with people not being able to find their respective winner/offerer, we've decided to make this post a place where those of you having such issues can leave a comment. This is to make sure that we don't miss or lose track of the issues as we receive them and, as a bonus, there might be a chance that you'll find someone you were looking for in the comments as they might have also been looking for you (we've already run into a few of these situationswhere PMs and emails seem to have gotten lost). We will try to follow up with these people by whatever method we can (PM/email).
Please use this template to leave a comment:
There will also be a post coming up for sign-ups for those who would like to request pinch-hits, specifically, those winning bidders who have clearly been informed by their offerers that they will not be following up with their offering. For those of you who have not heard back from your offerer yet, we request that you fill out the template here so that we can follow up with your offerer and, if in a week or two, you still hear nothing, you can sign up for a pinch hit on that post. OR, if you do not want to wait or for us to contact them again, you can say something along the lines of "requesting pinch hit" as part of the Additional Notes section.
Please note that this post is only for those people who are having difficulty contacting their offerer/winning bidder. You can use the questions post to voice other concerns.
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In other news, we continue to receive donation confirmations. Please, please send them in asap if you have not already and make use of the donation confirmation station as that is probably the quickest and most effective way for us to log them in.
Also, we are hoping to archive all the finished works made for this auction at our delicious account to show off how productive we have been. I will be making a post about that soon where you guys can leave a link to your finished products :)
ROUND 1 BIDDING CLOSED + offerers can now also help with notifications!
August 29th, 2010
AND WE'RE DONE!
All new comments from here on in will be screened. You can still leave questions and we will still see them and try to respond to them even though it may take us a little longer.
PLEASE NOTE: I have decided to allow offerers to contact their winning bidders directly , realizing that this would save us a lot of time. Mods will also continue to do this. Basically, for everyone, if you have seen that someone else (either the offerer or a co-mod) has notified the winner, you don't have to do it again. In the event where a winner has received more than one notification, don't panic. As long as the winner can send along their confirmation asap to the offerer (or mods), everything should be in working order :)
Offerers, please use the following template to let your winning bidder know that they've won:
Remember, use the following criteria to determine your winner:
A. If the post offers just one item and the highest bidder has won. B. If the post has more than one of the same item and their bid is in the top number of bids - eg. in the top three for a post with three items - they've won. C. For posts with multiple items but more identical bids than the number of items, preference is given to earlier bids.
(I don't think I need to say this but I'm hoping that everyone please play fair and notify winners according to these rules and not your friends, by favouritism, etc. Mods will be monitoring all notifications regardless and will contact you if there are any issues with your notification.)
Also: if you need help finding your offer, the delicious account is all updated now and you should be able to search your offerings by typing "by:______" in the search-bar, (your username in the blank).
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After you have received your winner's confirmation, please come by our DONATION CONFIRMATION STATION and let us know.
Thank you for participating, everyone! We will keep you posted with our progress and hopefully get everyone notified and their confirmations logged soon!
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ETA: you will see some new names helping us with notifications, such as 
epicflailer and slowascent. Just letting you know that they are official! Thanks for volunteering to help!
August 29th, 2010
With the round closing in less than 12 hours, I'm setting up some resources that will be useful once winning bidders are notified.
(On that note, here is a countdown courtesy of kirax2!)
So once the round has closed and the winning bidder has been informed of their win, they will confirm their donation in one of two ways:
1) by notifying the offerer directly, using the email they provided in their thread, OR
2) notifying the mods, who can be reached at helppakistan.lj[at]gmail.com
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Option 1:
If the winner confirms their donation to the offerer, the offerer then needs to reply to this post using the template provided below so we can keep track of the donation. If the offerer had more than one item up for auction, please use a separate template for each item; you can put multiple templates into one comment.
If your bidder ended up donating more specifically for your offer, please leave a note to that effect (such as combined payment for multiple offers, etc) in additional info.
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Option 2:
If bidders confirm their donation to the mods, the offeror doesn't have to do anything here. A mod will get in touch with them to let them know that the donation has been confirmed. If winners are sending confirmations to our email, once again, please include your lj username and "donation confirmation" in the subject, and the url of the offering thread somewhere in the body of the email.
Also, please bear in mind that your mods will probably be going through a lot of emails in the next few days and while we are understanding of some people's reservations of sending confirmations to offerers, if you are okay with contacting your offerer and sending them your confirmation, we recommend taking that route. Although we will make sure to pass along word of your confirmation to the offerer, you should be aware that they will find out a bit later this way.
Thank you for your participation! This post will be open for commenting once we start notifying winners (so Sunday afternoon).
If you have any questions in the mean time, please ask them here.
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ETA: If anyone wants to volunteer to help us notify winners and help out with confirmation logging and housekeeping, please either PM me or comment on the questions post with the subject "volunteer". I have amazing, amazing co-mods helping me out with this but more help would make everything go faster :)