Archive for the ‘digital’ Category
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Orange bids to bring mobile volunteering to the UK
Since vinspired.com 2.0 was a mere glint in an eye, the digital team at v has been keen to bring the service direct to mobiles. Already, around 2% of our traffic comes from mobiles, and recent IAB research shows that 44% of 16-24 year olds have checked their social media profiles through their phones. As most volunteering still happens in the real world, rather than online, it makes sense to give young people the chance to record their volunteering while they’re doing it, to inspire others and to get recognition for what they do. I recently registered as an iPhone developer, and plans for our first app are well underway.
We’ve also explored the concept of micro-volunteering as a way to encourage people to take their first steps towards giving their time, inspired by campaigning communities such as Oxfam’s Protect the Human, which promotes actions according to time taken. vinspired’s Festive Favours Advent Calendar featured quick and easy ways to show a bit of festive spirit, and we’ve been excitedly watching the evolution of The Extraordinaries micro-volunteering network, especially during the Haiti crisis.
The future’s mobile…
So, when Orange launched a mobile volunteering community, we jumped straight in. The company caused waves in the UK when they teamed up with Rockcorps to launch incentives for volunteers, a controversial move which has successfully delivered volunteering messages to large audiences through high-profile ad campaigns.
The problem with Orange Rockcorps, of course, is that it has limited scale - you can only fit so many people into one venue, and without “owning” further volunteering programmes, or a menu of opportunities, its expensive and difficult to extend the volunteering offer. So (in addition to the obvious product placement) it makes sense for them to create a mobile app to inspire their community of customers to work together to do good. Together with T-Mobile, they say they’ll have more customers than there are people in Canada - so it’s fair to say that a little time from just a percentage of them could go a long way.
The Orange mobile volunteering site
So what’s in it for charities?
Well, Orange is promising to add the best 10 ideas for mobile volunteering to its app, and to market this to its customers. So if you’ve got a task that could be light work with many hands, submit your idea on their community.
The question for me has been: are charities geared up to crowd-source exciting projects? While Orange have the marketing power to take the idea to a large number of people, it will be the tasks themselves which define its stickiness. Thankfully, initial signs are positive, and community members are rising to the challenge of pitching ideas to the public vote. Popular ideas already on the community include donating photos for charities to use on their websites (we’re sure lots of organisations using vinspired would love that service), mapping homeless people’s locations so that charities can offer help, and identifying sites in need of Guerilla Gardening makeovers.
Orange don’t currently seem keen to use mobiles to promote real-world volunteering in their own app, but they are also promising to promote 10 “apps for good” created by charities or social entrepreneurs. So if you’ve got an app that deserves some attention, let them know - or just get involved by voting for your favourite ideas on the Orange Mobile Volunteering site.
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Big shame for big society - behind the scenes of the vschools website
This weekend, reports in the national press mentioned the vschools website being shelved in a “big blow to big society”, so I thought it would be useful to give an insight into what the vschools site is.
The vschools site already exists, has been tested with pupils and schools, and hundreds of schools are ready to sign up. It’s just been sitting on a development server, waiting for a decision for the Department for Education - and sadly, they have decided to scrap the Youth Community Action programme, of which vschools was a part.
Here’s the story so far…
Back in December last year, we were asked to look at how we could build on the success of vinspired.com and the vinspired awards to create a safe, secure and engaging volunteering platform for 14-16 year olds in every maintained school in England.
Luckily we had a solid platform to (literally) build on: vinspired.com, a social platform connecting volunteers aged 16-25 with voluntary organisations who need their help. Building on top of this platform meant:
a) younger volunteers could move their accounts to vinspired at age 16, taking with them a record of their volunteering history
b) voluntary organisations could offer opportunities to the younger audience without doubling up on work
c) making the most of functionality we already had, and importantly
d) we could actually deliver an awesome website in a very short timescale without cancelling Christmas. (Just.)
Creating private spaces for schools & students
Using rapid, Agile development, we extended the vinspired platform, and designed and built private “walled gardens” for schools. This would ensure that pupils could share their photos, comments and achievements with others in their school, without sharing personal details or plans with the wider internet community. Schools could publish their own opportunities, and keep a record of the achievements of pupils at their school in one, easy to use dashboard. Pupils could view opportunities within the school and others in their local communities, offered by approved providers recruited by the vschools advisers.
Image: Logged in view of a school's profile. Please note this is only example content on a test server and does not reflect any relationship with the school, or real volunteering opportunities.
Schools were also given public web pages, where they could showcase their achievements (without identifying individual pupils) and share best practice.
Awards for all
Next up, we extended the age range for vinspired awards, so that pupils could get recognition for their efforts. To do this, we integrated the awards system into both vinspired and vschools user profiles, making it easy for young people to record the skills they learned and the impact they had on their communities. Both sites benefited from this one piece of work.
Image: Early designs for the vinspired awards integration
The next challenge was to work out how to create accounts for hundreds of thousands of pupils without creating loads of admin for staff. Synchronising with existing databases proved controversial in terms of data ownership. Allowing unchecked registrations provoked security concerns, and worries about how the right pupils would end up in the right walled garden. We eventually settled on a token system – school staff could generate unique codes allowing pupils to sign up within a limited time-frame. Each code linked them to the correct school.
Image: vschools service map
Buy-in from pupils, teachers and local authorities
We had, given the time-scales, planned to conduct user testing on the live site, as we had complete control over who could access each secure area, and a team of vschools advisers with contacts in schools who were keen to get involved. However, we were then required to conduct user testing prior to launching the site, so I visited Salford and Milton Keynes to run user testing sessions with pupils and teachers. The feedback was hugely encouraging, helping us to spot bugs but also confirming that the site could work for young people, and I’m grateful to all those who helped with this process.
Since then, a team of over 90 vschools staff have been showing the test site to schools and local authorities, whilst waiting for the green light to launch the site. Figures to end of June (July’s figures come later this week) show 1278 interested schools, with over 500 ready to sign up. Anecdotal evidence from vschools advisers suggest many schools committed to the project prior to the end of term.
So, for now the vschools site remains left on the shelf, but I am hopeful that we may yet find a like minded sponsor to help us realise the potential and share the vision.
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Volunteers can make a difference to digital exclusion
Today saw the launch of Race Online’s Manifesto for a Networked Nation, which recognises that the 10 million UK adults who have never used the internet are missing out in all areas of life. Several of the recommendations are aimed at the voluntary sector, as these are nicely summarised on the NCVO blog, so I won’t go into it here.
Instead, I’m going to tell you about a bloke called Darren who I met at Sidekick Studios recently. Darren runs EcoComputer Systems, a South London-based Social Enterprise that recycles computers and uses them to do good - whether it’s helping socially isolated elderly people to get online, or selling them and using the money to fund training courses for unemployed people and low-income families.
There are lots of reasons to like the EcoComputers model - it’s recycling, it does good and it makes sense for businesses or charities who would otherwise have to pay someone to take their old stuff away. But what really chimed for me was the attitude towards their volunteers. They see the value in investing in volunteers’ skills & personal development - for example, giving them a refurbished PC to use at home, so they can develop skills which they can then share with the elderly, or supporting their volunteers in setting up a community radio station broadcasting from the shop.
There’s something really nice about this “pass it on” approach to sharing skills, whether it’s training volunteers from scratch, or teaming up skilled digital media volunteers with voluntary organisations in need of help, as the Media Trust has done through the Community Voices project. I’m sure there are hundreds of examples out there, and many more in development - I’d love to hear more about them.
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Infocow: a site for young people made by young people
This morning, I went along to the ICA for the launch of Infocow, a really social site connecting young people (aged 14-19) to useful and reliable information and services on line.
Infocow came out of a three-year Futurelabs project called Greater Expectations, which was funded by BECTA. The project aimed to use digital technology to equip young people with the information and contacts they need to take control of their lives.
I was really excited to see that it doesn’t shy away from integrating with social networks and encouraging young people to make informed decisions about their privacy - refreshing as so many opt for the “pretend the rest of the internet isn’t happening” approach when it comes to under 16s. We all know that young people’s engagement online is hugely influenced by recommendations and online sharing, so features like Facebook Connect make sense for this audience.
The other thing that really stood out was the involvement of young volunteers, as well as teachers and other stakeholders, throughout the development - a process which is outlined in the research report. The brand, the name (love the logic), the social features and the simple, easy sign-up all seem to have been built with the end user in mind, rather than predetermined objectives or monitoring requirements.
From what I’ve seen and heard today, it seems that this site is an example of how genuinely involving the target audience right the way through can deliver great results - not to mention offer the opportunity to film a Windows 7 spoof, which I’m hoping to see on YouTube soon…
Decide for yourself at www.infocow.org.uk.
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Digital volunteers help Haiti
Back in June, we blogged about micro-volunteering project The Extraordinaries. In the wake of the Haiti disaster, the site is now catering to the huge numbers of people inspired to help by offering volunteers a real opportunity to make a difference to the relief effort.A new Haiti support page is harnessing the power of the crowd to help locate and identify missing persons. Volunteers can give just a few minutes of their time to sort and tag disaster images, and match sorted images with the faces of missing persons. The goal is to help desperate families find their loved ones.
Meanwhile, Crisis Camp Haiti kicks off in London tomorrow (Thursday 21 January). Crisis Commons facilitates partnerships and maintains a network of technology volunteers to respond to specific needs. The goal of the London session is to establish Crisis Commons London and a series of Crisis Camp events in London in support of Haiti, where both technical and non-technical people working together on tasks as diverse as coding apps, mapping work and translation.
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Cybermentors virtual volunteers take on the bullies
CyberMentors, the online peer mentoring scheme run by BeatBullying, is in the headlines today after its hard-hitting new advert was banned from TV for being “too brutal for younger audiences”.
But it is CyberMentors’ ability to forge partnerships with social networks that really stands out for me. YouTube is featuring CyberMentors on its front page all day today. And back in November, Bebo became the first social networking site to install a CEOP “report” button on the profiles of its 8 million users, featuring a link to the CyberMentors site.
By using social networks to offer reach out to young people in the very spaces where they might be bullied, CyberMentors helped over 176,000 young people with bullying and cyberbullying since its launch in March last year.
Lots of young people who’ve had horrible experiences are motivated to help others in the same situation. What’s great about CyberMentors is that it genuinely helps them to do that.
Young people, aged 11-25, are trained as CyberMentors, in schools and online, so that they can offer support to their peers. They’re also supported by trained counsellors, available online if needed, so site visitors always get the appropriate level of help, and younger volunteers are not in danger of having to deal with issues they’re not able to manage.
This video shows how using her experience of bullying to help others helped CyberMentors volunteer Georgia get her confidence back.
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Crowd-sourcing funding for voluntary projects
I’ve just discovered Kickstarter, a US-based website which allows budding entrepreneurs to crowd-source the money they need to bring their ideas to life. A service designer I know called it “my favourite website of all time”, and I can see where he’s coming from.
Project creators can offer products, services or other benefits (”rewards”) to inspire people to support their project: A hot-air balloon ride to the first person to pledge $300, an invitation to the BBQ for anyone who pledges more than $5. It’s up to each project creator to sculpt their own offers to inspire people to invest.
From crocheted yurts to plans to write everyone in the world a letter, the site is packed with weird and wonderful ideas, but it’s the voluntary projects which really got me thinking - such as this appeal to save a local community garden. Could it be that by stepping away from the format of traditional funding applications, we could actually inspire more creative volunteering opportunities? The very act of selling a simple idea, rather than a huge project plan, seems like a more natural way to test out your idea on the general public. Winning public support could inspire courage to test the boundaries and be really innovative.
I’m a big fan of Junction 49 and its commitment to supporting young volunteers in working together to bring their ideas to life, as well as v’s vcashpoint project. I’d love to see what would happen if we could add crowd-sourced funding into the mix. Something tells me that these young volunteers could teach hardened fundraisers a few tricks, and inspire new creative approaches to promoting charitable giving.
I love the idea of voluntary projects having a whole group of supporters, right from the start, who care enough about a project to dig into their pockets to help make it happen. As Kickstart says, a large group of people can be a tremendous source of money and encouragement.
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v’s robot warmly welcomed into Parliament
Well, we did it. We put a robot in Parliament. Not just any robot I have to say, a robot that writes out, word for word, what young people care most about - delivering those messages directly to the politicians. At a time when only 3% of young people have ever contacted their MP, the robot - nicknamed Voicebot - is a very modern twist on writing a letter to your MP.
Voicebot in Parliament
The Voicebot is part of v’s proactive research campaign called Voicebox.
At a reception hosted by Tim Loughton MP, shadow minister for children and young people, to launch the robot’s week-long stay in parliament, lots of MP’s got to hear about the project and meet with the robot itself.
Tim Loughton MP, shadow minister for children and young people talking with v volunteers
Speaking at the launch Tim Loughton MP said, ‘Voicebox puts young people right at the heart of democracy. This is a great initiative bringing politicians and young people together’.
Other MP’s visiting the robot, reading young peoples’ cares and talking to the v volunteers included Angela Smith MP, Minister for the Third Sector, who commented, ‘Young people are our future and it is vital that we listen and understand their needs and concerns. Voicebox is an excellent two-way communication tool. It has the potential to give us real insight, helping us to take action that is truly effective where it most counts’.
Angela Smith MP, Minister for the Third Sector reading young peoples cares
Terry Ryall, chief executive of v reminded those at the launch that ’hundreds of thousands of young people want to make the world a better place. The challenge for politicians everywhere is to take risks with new ways to engage young people ‘.
The full results of the research underpinning the robot is being fed into v’s project with the think tank Demos, A New Anatomy of Youth.
More pics of the launch available here.
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Robot gives young people a voice in Westminster
Throughout October, as part of Voicebox, v’s youth insight and empowerment project, a writing robot will be installed in the Houses of Parliament. Its role is to take the views of individual young people from all over England right to the heart of the UK’s political system; voicing young people’s concerns, in their own words, in the corridors of power.
v, the National Young Volunteers’ Service, and Sidekick Studios have created The Voicebot, an industrial web-enabled writing robot arm which writes out the messages sent via the internet. We pose the question, ‘what do you care about?’ and their answer is written out and recorded for all to see. In October, The Voicebot and the messages it has recorded will be displayed in a unique installation within the very walls of Houses of Parliament, literally getting the views held by young people under the noses of MPs.
v aims to tell the government what people really care about (in less than 160 characters). Its like updating your Facebook status, but its a direct conversation with the government. Like this example, from the Wired blog (see also their top 5 bizarre Twitter replacements).
“I care about my Mum with Alzheimer’s, I take care of her every day but she doesn’t even know who I am. Can you help us?”
The aim is to demonstrate that people, and young people in particular, do have views and opinions on politics, they just might not want to communicate via the traditional channels provided to them. Not many people can be bothered to write a letter to their MP, but if it was a bit easier maybe they would…
Another real prompt for action is the fact messing around with a writing robot is just kind of cool. Political agenda aside, visitors to the site want to see if it really works and this is a compelling motivation to send a message.
v are aiming this activity at 16-25 year olds but anyone of any age can send a message via The Voicebot. Messages sent by over 25s have their own digital image created and are logged in a digital gallery on Flickr. People aged 16-25 get emailed a photo of their message in the flesh - check out what they’re talking about on the results page.
We have one month to get as many people as possible to send their message and ensure we have a big impact on the Houses of Parliament. Spread the word - and try it out for yourself here.
The Voicebot from sidekick studios on Vimeo.
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Brazillian project provides practical solutions to bridge the digital divide
MetaReciclagem is an open network in Brazil which shows young people how to acquire, recycle and use technology for social change and inclusion in their communities.
This programme has spread really quickly, creating dozens of recycled computer labs throughout Brazil. In these labs, young volunteers collect used computer parts from donations and learn how to reassemble them, taking advantage of free software and internet access to learn through structured workshops, mutual learning and experimentation.
Completed, recycled computers are often donated to non-profit organisations or used to provide lower-income communities with access to technology and the Internet. The volunteers are then encouraged and incentivised to go on to set up new laboratories, with support from the virtual community of projects throughout the country.
Volunteers stay involved for an average of 1 year. Since 2003, over 5,000 young people have participated, most of whom come from families earning less than US$500 a month. Labs champion youth leadership, as volunteer Joe Nascimento explains: “The project is very decentralised; there is no boss. Instead, decisions are made through group discussions, and every opinion is valued.”
MetaReciclagem is a really practical way to show young people that it is possible - and affordable - to access technology and use it for social change and inclusion in their communities. It’s an inspiring project which keeps young volunteers at its heart, giving them the tools they need to help their communities cross the digital divide. MetaReciclagem champions open source, collaborative production and the use of technology for positive social change, and their business model suggests a commitment to practicing what they preach.
For more examples of practical projects tackling the digital divide, visit the UNESCO website, which also hosts a Community Multimedia Centres guide.
MetaReciclagem was one of 22 global projects analysed as part of Innovations in International Youth Volunteering, by v and Innovations in Civic Participation (ICP).
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Nice piece, yourself.
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