All For Good
In a move that is likely to give a considerable boost to volunteering, a bunch of different individuals and groups from the technology, marketing and public sectors – including industry behemoths Google and Craigslist, have set up an open-source platform to list volunteering opportunities, called All for Good. The project was launched in response to President Obama’s call to action and is managed by Google. Quoting from their ‘About‘ page,
Our core team is made up of volunteering enthusiasts from places like Google, Craigslist Foundation, UCLA, YouTube, FanFeedr and Aha! Ink. As a contributor to the All for Good project, Google is hosting the All for Good website and products. Several Google engineers worked on All for Good as a 20-percent project (Google lets engineers spend a day a week on projects that interest them), collaborating with a broader team to build the product.
Users can log in with their Facebook, Google, AIM, OpenID, Yahoo! or Netlog accounts. Though it is initially supposed to be US-centric, as per the FAQ, the site automatically identified me as being from London and listed a few London-based volunteering opportunities, which, given its US-focus are very limited in number.
The site seems fairly easy to use, and maps out the locations of different opportunities apart from listing them. That’s not a particularly new feature though, because VolunteerMatch in the US launched a Google Earth plug-in earlier this year that performs pretty much the same function. All for Good’s single most distinguishing feature is is the fact that it is open-source: any group that wishes to provide a volunteering opportunity can easily do this via the Volunteer Feed Listings form. Do-It does provide a similar offering in the UK, but it requires the use of the YouthNet-supported bespoke software V-Base.
It will be interesting to see how All for Good develops – they have already put out a call to developers who may be interesting in building All For Good apps, and to improve the beta.
[Via Ars Technica]
9 comments on “All For Good”
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Very interesting indeed.
It does feel like the current Do-It monopoly on a lot of volunteering data in the UK is holding back a lot of potential innovation…
Hi Tim – thanks for your comment. Do-It does seem rather restricting, which is why I’m keen to see how the open-source method works for All for Good. And by the way, great blog – adding it to our blogroll! It would be good if you could spread the word about VLabs to your colleagues and friends too
Very interesting article and one that in my opinion gives us a good glimpse of a very open future, or rather a future that needs to be very open and swift.
Interesting who the main contributors are and I’m suprised that there’s been no news at all about this within the sector press.
good article.
Well done for spotting this Anjali, it’s news to me. It will be interesting to see how big companies can bring their skills and power to the volunteering arena.
A lot of the opportunities on there come from http://www.volunteermatch.org and I was struck by this on their website:
“VolunteerMatch is about cooperation. We are a network that is only as strong as the partnerships that support it. None of us can build a community alone. We take partnerships seriously and seek to work with nonprofit, business and governmental leaders committed to building stronger relationships with their constituents around volunteering and service.”
This struck a chord. After yesterday’s Generation Digital conference, I’m looking forward to seeing how we can all work together to do some amazing stuff.
As a volunteer, volunteer manager and YouthNet employee (declaring my interest upfront :- ) I too am really interested in the development of All for Good. It has the potential to be the catalyst for loads of exciting changes in how we volunteer and offer volunteering via the web.
I think the key point though is how it raises the issue of the need to develop a new platform for promoting volunteering via the web. I’ve written a longer post about this here: http://www.volunteermanagers.org.uk/opportunities-change-volunteering
It’s on Google blog now: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/06/all-for-good-bringing-search-scale-and.html
Given your topic, I’d like to point out a resource which might be of interest if your readers are looking for high impact volunteering opportunities.
We recently launched Zoosa (www.zoosa.org) as a single destination for all social enterprise resources: news, blogs, actions/ideas, tweets, and jobs / professionals skills-based volunteer opportunities in the clean-tech, education, government, health care, and nonprofit sectors. Thanks to our partners, we already have several thousand volunteering opportunities & social enterprise resources posted!
I’d love to hear your feedback if you get a chance to visit our site!
Mike
The very first part of it has an express contradiction. ,