Got a second?
According to social entrepreneurs the Extraordinaries, we waste 9 billion hours a year playing solitaire when we could be working for social change. That’s right, those spare two minutes spent procrastinating at the computer could be used for a good cause, like helping your organisation!
Submitted
2/19/2010
By
actnow
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Updated
3/25/2010
Photographer : Serhio @ Flickr
Micro-volunteering makes it easy to volunteer for two minutes from anywhere. It lets charities and volunteers connect over the internet and use their small pockets of spare time for good. So if your volunteers are telling you they haven’t got the time, you can ask them for just two minutes!
Huh?
In a nutshell, micro-volunteering is a sort of remote crowd sourcing. It outsources large tasks to a large group of people. Using their computer or smart phone, people complete these quick, easy tasks individually on behalf of the organisation. Users can donate their time to a cause of their choice whenever they want for however long they want.
The idea is that more people would be willing to help out if volunteering didn’t require such a large commitment. Micro volunteering allows fifty people to donate five minutes of their time in order to complete a task collaboratively, rather than relying on one person coming forward to give up four hours. From now on, the bus ride home can be used for the greater good!
Micro-volunteering has proven a fantastic way to mobilise the support and services of thousands of people from all over the world. Through setting up a system which users can access remotely and complete small tasks quickly, micro-volunteering bypasses the logistics problems of volunteer management. There is no need for ongoing communication with volunteers or to set up volunteer roles. Also, you automatically high jump any language, geographical or time barriers. If you’re responding to emergency situations or crises, this kind of low resource volunteer management can prove priceless.
Micro-volunteering in action
You may have heard murmurs around micro-volunteering for a while, but it hasn’t been until very recently that this new type of activism really came into its own.
The Haiti earthquake sent micro-volunteering start-ups into overdrive. Trying to manage the overwhelming goodwill of thousands worldwide, technology driven applications were designed specifically for the Haiti purpose and sent into operation in a matter of days.
Social entrepreneurs The Extraordinaries were quick to set to work locating missing persons through microvolunteering. First, they imported thousands of news images of the earthquake from a range of sources. People were then asked to spend two minutes of their spare time tagging these images with information like gender, age and descriptions of the people in the photo. This is a task that would normally take months, but by crowd sourcing their people power, the Extraordinaries photo database collected more than 75,000 tags in less than two weeks.
From here the Extraordinaries built a search function, so that family members could easily search photos for their loved ones. Using a few key words like ‘woman’, ‘adult’ and ‘red shirt’, families could quickly search through results to look for specific people.
A facial matching program was also set up. This program asked volunteers to compare news photographs with that of a missing person in the hope of finding matches on behalf of families. Through the program, nearly 750 possible matches were made, with twenty-four being precise enough to contact family.
Meanwhile, fellow micro-volunteering enthusiasts Ushahidi have been using micro-volunteering to open up communication lines between Haitians and aid organisations. The organisation developed a short code so that people in Haiti could SMS their needs and locations for free. Within about ten minutes, Ushahidi’s micro-volunteers would then translate, categorise and disseminate the SMS’ to aid organisations on the ground. The service has proved invaluable, receiving messages from Haiti around every five seconds during the day. The chart below details the main SMS requests.
Photographer : Erik Hersmann @ Ushahidi
Caption : Erik Hersmann @ Ushahidi 22/01/2010 (http://blog.ushahidi.com/index.php/2010/01/22/the-nuts-and-bolts-behind-4636-in-haiti/)
The future
Micro-volunteering taps into a huge pool of human potential that organisations can leverage daily. The Extraordinaries already have big plans to bring micro-volunteering into the mainstream. For a small fee, organisations can use this company to outsource your jobs to anonymous helpers on the internet.
Usually, it tends to be those nitty gritty tasks that sap up valuable resources that are outsourced – the kind of tasks people are happy to do for ten minutes, not three hours. Photo tagging is a popular request, but everything from translating documents to mentoring students online can be outsourced to micro volunteering. Maybe you could use someone with video editing skills or designing a logo. Maybe it’s time you stopped playing solitaire and spent five minutes on a cause that means something to you.
This work is licenced under an Attribution-NoDerivs licence.
© 2008. First published on actnow.com.au
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