Have you ever spent 20 minutes waiting for your train with nothing to do? Or unexpectedly had the afternoon off? Have you also wished that you could give back to your community without simply sending a check or going through a laborious membership signup process? What if you could, spontaneously, volunteer your labor or expertise? Our “Volunteer Now!” project intends to enable this kind of on-the-spot volunteerism by connecting you, via your mobile phone, to volunteer opportunities in your immediate vicinity – or to organizations that can use your expertise over the phone.
A scenario: You’ve just missed your airplane and have 6 hours to kill at the Philadelphia airport. You click the “Volunteer Now!” button on your mobile phone. It asks you how much time you have. You answer “4 hours” and it returns a list of relevant matches. It knows that you are a business executive with a specialty in contract negotiation, so the first match is from “Pit Bull Rescue,” which needs someone to review a contract for a new kennel facility. Your profile history also shows that you sometimes enjoy good old hammer-swinging physical labor. The second match is from “Wister Middle School,” which is 2 miles from the airport and is having a volunteer cleanup day today.
You decide that it’s too much effort to figure out how to get to the school, so you select “Pitt Bull Rescue” instead. Next, you see the organization’s profile screen which gives you some background information and comments from past volunteers. Several prior volunteers rated the organization very highly, so you choose it.
Immediately, the contract is sent to your mobile device. You review it, make notes, and write a short comment that says that everything seems to be in order. You click send and grab a beer. Later, Pitt Bull Rescue calls you to thank you for your volunteer effort and tells you that they’ve decided to go ahead with the new kennel facility. They send you a photo of a dog that was rescued today.
Imagine other examples: You’re a Chinese/English speaker and help a recent Chinese immigrant navigate their hospital’s Interactive Voice Menu in a three-way call. You copyedit a nonprofit’s brochure. You talk a computer novice through the process of using the Windows Start Menu. You identify Martian craters on your phone's web browser via the NASA clickworker program.
Projects like SETI@Home have showed that massive computational problems can be solved when a distributed group of people donate their computers’ spare CPUs to crunch data. This project will explore the possibility that this same theory can be applied to spare human “CPUs.” We believe that it will reveal a massive untapped capacity to do good by merging human location data with volunteer opportunity data.
Since posting this project to Net2, we’ve heard from all kinds of people who want to help with the project! Some volunteer organizations (and related orgs who support them) have indicated that exporting their volunteer opportunity data to a common XML format is a real possibility. We propose to work with the community to define this common format so as to build a data-bridge across nonprofit volunteer organizations. So, this is the first piece of data. The second piece of data relates to the volunteer him or herself. It’s personal data about the volunteer:
1) The latitude and longitude of the volunteer (transmitted automatically via the volunteer’s mobile phone)
2) The statement of ‘here, now, and willing’ intent. In other words, the volunteer clicks “Volunteer Now!” at the moment when he or she is available and interested in volunteering. Harnessing this type of intent - these spare and "contributable" periods of time which interspese our lives - is really very hard without a mobile device.
From 2004-2007, we conducted register to vote and get out the vote campaigns via mobile phones. Please see: http://mobilevoter.org/campaigns.html. Each campaign included mechansims that enabled people to galvanize their friends and family to register/vote.
As a project relating to volunteerism, this is a volunteer project! I’m volunteering to do project management. Chris is working on some of the back end. Jon is working on the Java Android implementation (we’re shooting to enter the Android competition by April 14th). We've got all kinds of other help since posting this project to Net2. Right now, we could still use:
* an expert in XML Schema & formats
* someone to code our matching algoritm and tag normalizer
* someone to call all of the volunteer orgs to tell them what we're doing
We'll probably use FireEagle.com to access people's location data. And we're currently putting together lots of meetings with volunteer organizations to develop the XML data export format. We can start by mashing up Craigslist volunteer data, but the matches won't be as good as when we get the XML data in place.
| Additional Project Idea Representative: | Marty Kearns | |
|---|---|---|
| Project Designer | Chris Purvis | |
| Project Engineer | John Wells |
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.
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Comments
what about what the organizations think?
I'm a volunteer manager. I involve volunteers, including online volunteers. I've involved hundreds of online volunteers. Maybe thousands. So please know where I'm coming from when I ask: Have the developers for this project talked to organizations to find out what THEY need regarding volunteers? From this entry, as well as another article I've read about this project, it does not sound like it at all. Volunteering isn't for people who want to squeeze it in between flights. Volunteering is much more serious than that. Organizations *cannot* come up with tasks for volunteers to do whenever they might have some time, when they can get around to it, etc. Our work is *much* more important than that. I want volunteers who are seriously committed to the mission of the organization I'm also supporting, who understand that the organization has goals and deadlines that are every bit as real as corporate ones, and who will make *real* time, regularly, to undertake tasks. A corporation wouldn't hire someone to work whenever they might have some time between flights -- WHY would an organization want such a volunteer?
<><><><><>
Jayne Cravens
Bonn, Germany
http://www.coyotecommunications.com
re: what about what the organizations think?
Hi Jayne -
I understand your perspective - and agree that there are, undoubtedly, times when an organization will want a long-term committed and well-trained volunteer. This project does not intend to replace this sort of volunteerism. Instead, it intends to open a new market for volunteerism – that of the “casual volunteer.”
The idea is that when we reduce the requirements of participation, more people will participate. If you ask most people about volunteerism, they say that they don’t have the time. So instead of approaching the question from the perspective of organizational needs, we’re approaching it from the perspective of the volunteer – the volunteer that is not currently participating due to lack of time.
And why would you want this volunteer? Because they have a lot to offer in 20 minutes such as:
· Delivering groceries to an elderly person
· Helping a computer novice with a software problem
· Editing copy for a brochure
· Answering a tax question
· Translating for a foreign-speaker
These are all low-effort tasks that can be accomplished in 20 minutes. They all also have a defined value to the recipient of the assistance. These are not your typical volunteer tasks – they are categorically new tasks that can be accomplished by volunteers when there is a low-effort way to give back.
trying again
>>will want a long-term committed and well-trained
>>volunteer.
That's NOT my argument, that only long-term committed volunteers are of value to an organization. If you have worked with organizations that involve volunteers, then you know that the requirements of a short-term volunteer, even one-time-project volunteer, still mean the volunteer has to actually do the project, by a particular deadline, or on a particular day, and the organization has to actually know the project is going to get done. Even short-term, one-time volunteering is a real commitment, not between-flights/between beers.
Yes, a volunteer may take just 20 minutes to deliver groceries to an elderly person -- but that volunteer needs to be screened (including a criminal background check) to ensure the client's safety, and that volunteer must be trained to make sure their behavior is appropriate. That takes longer than 20 minutes, and if a volunteer can't be bothered to do that, he or she isn't ready to volunteer. Same with "Helping a computer novice with a software problem" -- as a volunteer manager, I want to check that person's qualifications, I want to interview that person to make sure he or she is approriate, and I want to train that person regarding the unique culture of our nonprofit and its clients. For someone editing a brochure: I want to see samples of that person's writing, and I want some pre-screening to make sure he or she can communicate well online. Answering a tax question -- again, there needs to be screening and training. Translating for a foreign-speaker -- again, screening, training, pre-evaluating.
Online volunteers for one-time projects still fill out applications and go through online orientations, just like an onsite volunteer -- an organization must ensure that its tasks are going to get completed, by people who have the qualifications to do such, in a quality manner and by the deadline. There is research and testimonials on how the drop out rate for online volunteers goes down the more you require applicants to go through the same application and training as onsite volunteers -- did you bother to read any of the literature already out there about this?
A corporation wouldn't do any less with paid staff members editing a brochure, training a person on software, answering a tax question, making deliveries -- why on earth would you hold nonprofits and unpaid staff (volunteers) to a lesser standard? Do you think so little of the quality of our work?
>These are not your typical volunteer tasksThese ARE typical volunteer tasks! Please do more research! These are all things volunteers are doing right now, online and onsite, for thousands of organizations! And they've been doing them for many years.
>The idea is that when we reduce the requirements of>>participation, more people will participate
But every organization that involves volunteers will tell you that what is needed for more people to participate is *more support volunteer management*. Volunteers are not free. Creating assignments, supervising volunteers, training staff to work with volunteers, etc., takes expertise and a great deal of time. Almost all work of a nonprofit is deadline driven -- they can't wait around for casual volunteers to maybe get around to it eventually!
>instead of approaching the question from the>>perspective of organizational needs, we’re approaching
>>it from the perspective of the volunteer
And that, for me, is the fundamental problem with this and every corporate-driven volunteer initiative -- instead of talking to the primary customer (the organizations), you talk to the secondary customer (people who *might* volunteer).
Did you know that most organizations cannot involve everyone that wants to volunteer? They have to turn people away because they don't have the resources needed to involve more volunteers, or the person who is the volunteer manager has many other responsibilities that have nothing to do with volunteers. And now you want to create *more* volunteers, who will excitedly jump on board expecting to be able to do volunteering whenever they might feel like it, for five minutes, only to discover there isn't enough opportunities to go around?
In the early days of ImpactOnline, which became VolunteerMatch, organizers learned the hard way that generating lots of interest in volunteering, without having lots of volunteering opportunities for people to sign up for, created frustration, even hostility, regarding volunteering. So they turned their attention to the *organizations*, helping them to input assignments. Getting volunteers is *easy* -- getting the assignments is what's hard.
Learning from that experience, online volunteering/virtual volunteering has fared a bit better: it's the easiest sell in the world to potential volunteers, but there aren't enough online volunteering assignments for everyone who wants them. Hence why the Virtual Volunteering Project spent its energy working with organizations to create assignments, and why the UN's Online Volunteering service does the same.
I ask again that you please take a pause and start talking to organizations that actually involve volunteers -- that develop assignments, supervise volunteers, track their work, evaluate their impact, etc. Learn more about the fundamentals of quality volunteer involvements, and the many, many lessons learned from various tech-related projects over the last 10 years. Do this if you really do want this project to be something of value to organizations that involve volunteers. Don't make the same mistakes that have been made again and again by people who are from outside the sector and try to launch a tool or service they think we need.
<><><><><>
Jayne Cravens
Bonn, Germany
http://www.coyotecommunications.com
re: trying again
Jayne,
Great to have this discussion - It seems that we conceive of the process of civic engagement diffently, which leads us to different conclusions. However, I very much value your perspective & critique - it'll help us to focus the project as we move forward.
-ben
Sometimes you should think
Sometimes you should think outside the narrow field of your expertise and realise that things that are completely different can be positively rewarding for those involved. You are not the only 'expert' in this field.
Your points are valid but there are organizations out there that may have short tasks which volunteers may want to get involved with. Engaging volunteers is important but something like this could be the first step to further engagement leading to recruitment of volunteers "who are seriously committed to the mission of the organization".
Re: Volunteer Now! - I will help
Hi Ben,
This is a great idea. I live in the Sacramento area and we have a non-profit organization called Hands On Sacramento that links organizations that need volunteers with the volunteers. The volunteers go on the Hands On Sacramento web site and sign up for projects. Your application will help with the coordination of the volunteer activities.
If you need help calling volunteer organizations to let them know about Volunteer Now! I would be glad to help.
Thanks, Lynne
Your help
Hi Lynne - We'd love your help!
Let's discuss on phone. Please email me at ben [[at]] mobilevoter [[dot]] org to set up a good time. Looking forward to chatting!
-ben
Thesis project
Hi,
I am working on a graduate thesis design project that is pretty much this same project. I have completed a bunch of user research and concept validation. If you would like to speak further, let me know. I am very interested in speaking with you.
types of opportunities
Hi Ben-
This is a great idea, but I'm curious what kind of volunteer opportunities - other than service oriented projects - would benefit from 'on-the-spot' volunteers? I know that for many small orgs, managing and training volunteers is a big challenge, especially for those that are growing.
cheers,
-justin
Re: Types of Opportunities
Justin,
Really good question – and a great lead in to my take on the future of volunteerism. The first group of projects is simple manual labor projects – these are soup kitchen and neighborhood cleanup projects – organizations that need an extra hand during expected time slots. You could also throw into this mix: organizations that have unmet computer needs such as setting up networks, getting printers to work, general computer help. In all but the most expert NPOs, there’s always some computer issue that needs addressing.
The next group is organizations that need specialized expertise – legal & CPA advice, more advanced technical information, Web strategy, vetting of ideas by an expert in almost any field. The legal & CPA category is an ongoing need shared by most organizations. The specific strategy verticals make more sense when there are enough volunteers in the system to enable quick answers to specific questions. For example, if an organization decides to start a blog, they’d benefit from 20mins on the phone with a blogger who can talk about the time requirements, technology options, common problems, etc. I’m betting that most organizations have a whole list of these types of questions that they’d love to talk over with an expert.
Beyond these two existing categories, I’m imagining a realm of volunteer services & needs that are unmet because there is no efficient system (as of yet) to match service with needs. Take my elderly friend Freda, for example. She sells old books on Ebay. The thing is, she’s not terribly conversant with computers. She gets by (mostly with help from the Jewish Community Center), but she’s always got a million questions for me when I drop by to say hello. On a daily basis, she could use 20mins of basic instruction on the computer - the JCC could extend their services with this sytem. Or, Freda could request help directly, without incurring the overhead of the JCC.
Then, let’s take it a step further and imagine a recent immigrant who speaks Chinese and no English. This person goes to their local community center looking for assistance. The community center enters their phone number into the volunteer database and notes that they need translation assistance anytime between 9-5. A Chinese/English speaking volunteer calls into the volunteer system and is connected with this recent immigrant. Then, on 3-way calls, the volunteer can help the immigrant navigate the complexities of the US medical/tax/residential system. Here, I’m drawing from Tad Hirsch’s Speakeasy project (http://web.media.mit.edu/~tad/htm/speakeasy.html).
You could also imagine a get out the vote campaign that needs help calling prospective voters. Or a nonprofit that needs assistance finding media contacts in a given locality. Or an organization that needs help copywriting their newsletter in the next few hours.
And now one step further... the system could be used to support so called "Clickworker" programs such as the one piloted by NASA in which average people marked craters on the surface of Mars. By aggregating the spare time of average people, more than 1.9million entries were made. This work was normally done by graduate students working for months on end. The clickworkers' results were of a quality indistinguishable from the graduate students. In this example, the images could be sent to the volunteer's mobile phone. This program demonstrated clearly that, in some instances, discrete tasks performed by a large number on untrained volunteers can accomplish a task that would normally require a large number of highly trained professionals. (reference: The Wealth of Networks, page 69).
Although a little less exciting for the Volunteer, the system could also model the Seti@Home program, where volunteers were asked to contribute the spare processing cycles of their computers. As phones become more powerful, they might actually be useful in contributing processing power in a distributed manner. You could imagine a volunteer opportunity phrased as "Not using your phone for the next 20 mins? Howabout letting it do some calculations for a good cause?"
There may be a whole undiscovered volunteer economy here. It would work especially well at scale – where volunteers can be quickly connected to people who have immediate needs – but it also works on smaller scales in a more limited and traditional fashion. To your point, it doesn’t work when an organization needs people to be trained in a particular way – there’s no getting around training requirements for complex and specialized tasks. But for less complex needs – many of which may not yet be visible – it has some potential. For one, I’m really excited to see what kind of economy develops when there’s a practical way to take advantage of spare time. I suppose it's kind of like Amazon's Mechanical Turk - but focused on doing good. Anyone know Bezos? Maybe we could use their back-end?
Long winded answer! Hope this clarifies my thinking. Love to hear your reaction.
got it
Hi Ben-
In short, I get it. Thanks for the extended response - the potential here is amazing.
IMHO, the trick will be figuring out how to categorize the opportunities so that folks who want to volunteer can easily connect with the NPO's in need. Maybe through a tagging system? I know that matching volunteer language and NPO language is a big challenge sometimes.
Also, in my day job I work for the Chicago Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights (www.clccrul.org), that is based on legal servives volunteer model. If pitched correctly, I think that big firms would definitely buy into an idea like this. Let me know if you'd like more info on how CLCCRUL works - happy to fill you in.
Cheers,
-Justin
RE: GOT IT
Justin,
Yes, I think you've hit one of the big challenges head-on. This is how I’m thinking about approaching a solution.
· Develop or extend an existing microformat.
· Use the most limited set of fields possible to enable relevant matching. Err towards limiting the fields over smarter matching possibilities.
· For participation in the system, require that volunteer organizations export their data using this format – to their own servers. Our nightly cronjob will then go get all validated feeds.
I know that requiring a format may be tough going, especially for non-technical organizations. But if the value is there (and, even better, funding for this purpose), perhaps it will be possible. Otherwise, you’re right, I don’t know how you’d get good matches.
Anyone have any ideas? – would love some community input/ideas here.
Justin, getting big law firms to buy-in would be *amazing* - what a perfect match up. It does raise the issue of how to get this system working in advance of the Android operating system being released (and on phones in the market). I have some ideas though – such as alternate interfaces (eg: texting). I'm fairly sure it can work today on Iphones (might be a good place to start). These alternatives are not as compelling as universal access, but they’ll work in the short term. The other route is to get the carriers to put the “Volunteer Now!” icon on their decks… which would be something of a long process/battle. But call me – would love to discuss: 415.641.4927
methods
Hi Ben-
I think that requiring properly formatted feeds is the only way to make it manageable on your end, and it's easy enough to teach someone how to set up a feed. Maybe make setting up the feed as the defailt opening-volunteer opportunity for every new NPO member that joins the site...
As to the interface, I think having options for users is key. Texting, e-mail, IM-bots, and wap should all be options. Question - and this is where my tech knowledge ends - can you send texts based on the location of a handset with prior user permission? That would be one hell of a feature.
And I know this may expand the scope of the project a bit much, but what about creating a calendar plug-in? The volunteer could install an add-on to their calendaring system (outlook, gcal, etc) that would recognize when and where they are, when they have freetime, and match that with opportunities....
Left you a message on law firms - that conversation makes more sense over the phone.
cheers,
-j
I love this idea
I love this idea and while I cannot perhaps offer any practical advice, I would definitely become an end-user of this if it was available, both from being part of a nonprofit that could use spontaneous volunteers and as a perpetual volunteerer who doesn't always have a project. There is some great thinking going into this!
Voting
Hey Greg -
Glad you like the concept! One thing you could do is help us get together some votes for the project when voting starts in a few days. Maybe send out a note to friends or somthing - doing well in the competition would really help to coalessce additional volunteers around the project - and to motivate those arleady working on it.
Cheers,
-ben