ICTlogy

Adolfo Hernández, general manager of Sun Microsystems Ibérica explained last Thursday at Volunet his (company’s) point of view of what online volunteering is about.

Here come my notes (mainly a copy of some of his presentation’s slides ;)

e-Volunteer profile:

• must feel comfortable working with ICT
• is community contribution orientated (team working)
• masters emotional intelligence
• is able to work in multicultural and multinational environments
• has no space or time barriers
• leads (people, projectes) without authority but through his own skills (with “example”)

Profile of the e-Volunteer/NGO worker in the Information Society:

• follows a continuous learning: is learning oriented
• has a strong commitment: has an emotional line up with the NGO
• is confident with the NGO and its mission
• has a good comprehension/understanding of all the issues concerning the NGO activity

e-Vonlunteering must capitalize:

• connectivity
• innovation and knowledge
• new e-talent
• relationship with enterprises

Of course his point of view is quite enterprise centered and you could be talking about any worker within the Information Society, but this does not make his speech less valid :)

Some posts and news about Volunet, the International Conference on Volunteering and New Technologies.

[image from El Correo Gallego]

I’ve yet to gather my notes, but so far, some information from other bloggers and internet media:

• Dorfun‘s comments to first day of congress (in Galician)
• Dorfun‘s comments to second day of congress (including my own presentation and workshop with Hanne Engelstad) (in Galician)
• Dorfun‘s comments to third day of congress (in Galician)
• Article in El Correo Gallego about my presentation and the others that took place on Friday (2nd day of congress) (in Spanish) [via Fírgoa]
• Article in La Voz de Galicia about the presentations that took place on Friday (2nd day of congress) (in Spanish)
• A photo of some of the speakers posted by Enrique Dans. I’m in front down left, leaning on the table.

Hope I can give my own point of view this afternoon.

As I wrote on February 22nd, I’ll be speaking at Volunet.

The program is now closed and can be consulted in Galician and Spanish

My schedule has changed a bit and is as follows:

• Thursday 7th, 16:00. Plenary session: Online Volunteering, where I will talk about the online volunteer profile, e-volunteer taxonomy and typology and my favorite hypothesis: the online volunteer is a knowledge intensive one (which, besides, I guess it’s obvious ;) In fact, I will be talking one hour long just about that – hope I don’t get the audience bored to death
• Tuesday 7th, 18:30. Workshop: e-Learning for Development, where Hanne Engelstad and I will show what we do in the Campus for Peace and our idea that it is possible to set up e-learning projects for free by means of free software (LMS), free content (CC and LO repositories), and unselfish human resources (online volunteers)
• Friday 8th, 18:30. Workshop: e-Learning for Development. Same as preceeding day.

JustVolunteers.org is a new volunteering matching site run by NY Corporation Baou, Inc.

It offers what they call “Virtual Opportunity”.
Would I recommend it? nope
Why? Go there and try if you can find anything of your interest.

Error #1: “virtual” is not a category, but a channel. I mean, my profile is not a choose amongst Politics, Environment or Virtual Opportunity. I might be interested in volunteering for the environment even if I wanted to do it virtually.

Thus, this category is a complete mess.

On the other way, error #2, we should start building a consensus on what we call online volunteering. I once draw four types of online volunteering. People usually stand on the first type (Advocacy) while I’d prefer 3rd or 4th (real online volunteering). So, we’ve got a problem here. No matching site will work until we solve, at least, these two big errors or, at least, we make up something to keep everybody within the same framework and discriminate different definitions.

My opinion, of course ;)

Next 7, 8 and 9 March I’ll be speaking at Volunet.

Volunet is the International Conference on Volunteering and New Technologies organized by the Xunta de Galicia, the Government of Galicia, Spain.

The program is still provisional, but it looks quite interesting – I’ll try and post it here when it is official.

This is what I’m asked to do there:

• Tuesday 7th, 18:30. Workshop: e-Learning for Development, where I will show what we do in the Campus for Peace and my idea that it is possible to set up e-learning projects for free by means of free software (LMS), free content (CC and LO repositories), and unselfish human resources (online volunteers)
• Friday 8th, 18:30. Workshop: e-Learning for Development. Same as preceeding day.
• Saturday 9th, 10:00. Plenary session: Online Volunteering, where I will talk about the online volunteer profile, e-volunteer taxonomy and typology and my favorite hypothesis: the online volunteer is a knowledge intensive one (which, besides, I guess it’s obvious ;) In fact, I will be talking one hour long just about that – hope I don’t get the audience bored to death

Yes, even if it might sound as something quite new, there’s a classical approach to online volunteering.

I can read here, here and, in part, also here, examples on how to e-volunteer or ways e-volunteers can help organizations. Right. The examples given are good and they do work.

Nevertheless I call it the classical approach because it usually deals with the virtualisation of onsite/offline/”real” volunteers. What I mean is that it is not an endogenous way of thinking about the internet possibilities, but designing volunteering posts as always and, then, after that, try and see if volunteers can stay home and do the things we planned.

I’m not saying this is not the way, but that this should have been the correct way until the whole thing became mature. Now that we’ve got some experience in the field, I think we should turn into – as I said before – some endogenous way of online volunteering design.

And this keeping in mind what the Internet is all about:

• Knowledge Management: I guess there’s no doubt that ICTs’ main added value is dealing with knowledge (we could talk whether it is knowledge, information or just data), so when talking about e-volunteers (or teleworkers) a good approach should be the identification of our most knowledge intensive tasks and the identification of our major knowledge holders. Matching should then be just fun.
• Networking: Talking to Janet Salmons past Friday I told her that we usually did not had individual online volunteers but teams. It seems to me that in a network architecture such as Internet’s, networking becomes almost a must. If we add the Knowledge Management approach, connecting people that know with knowledge intensive tasks/projects, then the networks is the way.

So far, end of my morning sermon ;)