How to Contribute to or Volunteer with Gwulo

Gwulo is a community-built archive of old Hong Kong, with over 60,000 pages and more than 40,000 photos, and its founder David explicitly welcomes new participants. You can contribute in three main ways: join the community and add content, volunteer to process scanned pages for the Leo Landau Prisoner of War diary project, or attend and help spread the word at Gwulo talks. The diary project is the most concrete volunteer task with a defined process, so start there if you want a specific job rather than open-ended browsing.

Join the community and add what you know

The site describes its content as "added by a friendly community of people who enjoy sharing what we know about Hong Kong's history," and the welcome message says "you are very welcome to join us." If you have old Hong Kong photos, memories, or corrections to existing pages, that is the baseline form of contribution — the archive grows from what members share.

If you only want to follow along rather than post, the free weekly newsletter delivers old Hong Kong photos and stories. Note the site uses "subscribe" language for this newsletter; the newsletter itself is described as free, while the Gwulo books (Volumes 1–4) are separate paid items sold through the site.

Volunteer for the Leo Landau POW diary project

This is the clearest volunteer role described on Gwulo. The project is putting Leo Landau's Prisoner of War diary online, and it is organized as a queue of scanned pages that volunteers process one at a time.

Current progress: Volunteers have already processed the pages from 1942 and 1943, and are making good progress with 1944. Pages from 1941–43 are already readable online.

How to sign up:

1. Reply by email to the newsletter with DIARY in the subject line.
2. David will send you the files for the next page in the queue.
3. Follow the documented steps for processing a scanned page (Gwulo publishes a page describing the required steps — read it before you start so you know what the output should look like).

What to expect: You are working through a queue, so you will receive one page's files at a time rather than the whole diary. The task is transcription/processing of scanned pages, not original research. If you want to see the standard you are working toward, read the already-published 1941–43 diary pages first.

Attend Gwulo talks and events

Gwulo runs in-person talks, and the newsletter is where they are announced with booking links. Recent examples from the site:

• Talks in York and Edinburgh drew "a good mix of long-term followers of Gwulo, and people who have a connection to Hong Kong but are new to the site."
• Upcoming at the time of that newsletter: Wed 7 Oct, Gwulo talk in Cheltenham and Sat 10 Oct, Gwulo talk in Exeter, with booking and details via links in the newsletter.

Attending is a low-commitment way to meet the community; if you have a Hong Kong connection but are new to the site, the newsletter notes that this is exactly the audience these talks attract.

Which route fits you

Common snags

• The diary sign-up is by email, not a form. The instruction is specifically to reply to the newsletter with DIARY in the subject line — if you write to Gwulo without that subject line, your message may not be routed to the diary queue.
• Read the processing steps before requesting files. Gwulo publishes the steps required to help process a scanned page; skipping them means redoing work.
• Talks are location-specific and book through external links. The Cheltenham and Exeter dates above are past examples from the newsletter — check the current newsletter for what is actually scheduled rather than assuming those dates still apply.
• The newsletter and the books are different things. "Free newsletter" and the paid Volume 1–4 purchase links appear separately on the site; subscribing to the newsletter does not include the books.