We’re auctioning off the very first 12 pre-production Model A Raspberry Pis, with some other goodies like books, shirts and an Adafruit Pi Plate, to raise money for charities over Christmas.

Today’s charity was chosen (they held a vote and everything) by the team of mods who work so hard to keep our forums a nice place to be: they make sure this site is innocent of spam and flamewars, and make sure it’s a friendly and informative place for kids and new-to-all-this adults to visit. We think they do an incredible job, and they work extraordinarily hard (I’ve just checked the logs, and in the last hour or so just one member of the team has done 50 separate pieces of work, moderating and OK-ing new posts, squashing spam accounts and doing all the other behind-the-scenes stuff you don’t see).

It doesn’t stop: we get thousands of new posts on the forums every day; every single one of them needs checking to make sure it’s not a sneaky advert for a flimsy plastic kichen (we get a lot of kitchen spam, for some reason), and we couldn’t run this place without the incredibly hard work the mods do. So THANK YOU, Abishur, ukscone, ShiftPlusOne, Jamesh, Gert, Obarthelemy, Jongoleur, Dom, Guru, asb, stevepdp, Jessie, Plugwash, Lynbarn, MPThompson, Scep, Mahjongg, Sparky, rdb and Masafumi_Ohta. We appreciate the work you do to keep our forums a safe, happy and informative place all the time, but we particularly appreciate it at Christmas, when we know you have presents to play with and those big boxes of cheesy nibbles to eat.

Click to bid on the Mods’ Pi (and other affiliated goodies). There will only ever be 12 of these pre-production models made, and this one is currently a total steal.

The mods’ chosen organisation is the Open Rights Group (who are not registered with eBay’s charity arm, so the funds look as if they’re going to the Raspberry Pi Foundation, but we will be paying 100% of the money raised on this auction to the Open Rights Group). The ORG is UK’s leading voice defending freedom of expression, privacy, innovation, creativity and consumer rights on the net. ORG is a member organisation of European Digital Rights (EDRi). They campaign to change public policy whenever digital rights are threatened, by talking to policy-makers, informing the public through the media, and mobilising their supporters. 

Click here to bid!