Posts Tagged ‘mobile phones’
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On-demand volunteerism by mobile phone
A perceived lack of time is one of the biggest barriers to volunteering, and virtual volunteering is often cited as an ideal solution for time-strapped people, so when I stumbled upon The Extraodinaries, I was fascinated. This American initiative delivers micro-volunteer opportunities to mobile phones, from translating a charity’s website into a foreign language to identifying craters for NASA or birds for the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. The theory is simple: everyone has moments of spare time, so what if everyone used these moments for the common good?
The Extraordinaries blog claims: “Thus far, no-one has brought crowdsourcing to mobile phones… the device that’s always on-hand when people have spare time. And while there have been one-off efforts to turn crowdsourcing to social good, no-one has built an organization dedicated to the purpose. With The Extraordinaries, we’re pioneering a promising new field.”
The service is currently in Beta testing, and is only available on the iPhone. I’d be really interested to hear from anyone involved in the Beta testing. If you’d like to find out more about how the service works for voluntary organisations, watch the interview with co-founder Jacob Colker on Volunteer Match’s Engaging Volunteers blog.
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