ICTlogy

I am subscribed to three or four zillion newsletters and/or feeds.
One of them talks to me about what do NGOs need in the field of human resources. Cute: they include an “Online Volunteering” category, this is quite new… and cute! :)

BUT, last issue I got from this newsletter, had 6 online volunteering opportunities. 5 of them were related to subscribing online campaigns, sending e-mail to governments or asking you to help this or that web site be known by your friends. Spread the word, parbleu! ;)

Just one of them was about IT online support.

Previous issue was even poorer.

Yep, subscribing online campaigns might be online volunteering… but… aren’t we running out of imagination? Is this the power of online volunteering? Ever heard of added value?

Gray Monday, indeed…

Surfing through imabrokekid I got to TimeBank, a volunteering national campaing settled in the UK and funded by the BBC. It is sort of a “marketplace” such as Hacesfalta.org in Spain.

They have a Virtual Volunteering section. The intention is good but the info is quite poor (i.e. no reference to UN Online Volunteers at all) and their list of tasks you can do as an e-volunteer just skips the most – for me – important of they all: training.

I thing online volunteering still has to reach shape and weight as a concept. I’d like and help to it :)

Scott posts for help to gather some online volunteers and help him and the Peace Corps to build web sites for NGOs and other development organizations.

He’s now trying to build a site where to work with these volunteers.

Hope we could help somehow.

Colleges and universities are engaging in virtual projects with developing countries throughout the world. Such projects give faculty an opportunity to collaborate with their peers, to conduct research, and to strengthen their organizations. Students who enroll in virtual internships or who participate in the project are able to gain experience in employing “appropriate technology” e-solutions in places where information sharing, education, training, and community and health support are desperately needed.

I found this in XPlanaZine

There’s a cute example following the lines I quoted but I don’t see whether it is a real example, ’cause it all starts with “colleges and universities are engaging in virtual projects” but I cannot see further information or links to some of these projects.

Anyway, the post is worth reading it and it’s just about a thing I’ve commented here zillions of times: content, content, content and services, services, services, this time carried on by students acting non-profit (well, they get some marks, but at least it is not about money)

By the way, Xplana has changed recently so now you just have to syndicate once and not three times (articles, whitepapers, interviews) as before.

This is an article that deals about a project carried on within the framework of the Campus for Peace by IWith.org

Its authors are Remei Camps, director of IWith.org Spain, and F. Isabel Sales and Arantxa Uribe-Echevarria, online volunteers at the Campus for Peace (UOC)

I’m really pleased to see this article on-line as it’s been the result of two years of hard work.

Abstract:

The objective of the Absoo Programme is to adapt the technological tools offered by e-learning to local projects working on a day-to-day basis to provide quality education for children in developing countries. As part of this programme, a pilot course was developed and given in the UOC’s Campus for Peace VLE as a prototype for validating a methodological model for e-learning on a solidarity project.

This document brings together analysis of the experiment, from its instructional design to the development and evaluation of this pilot course. The section on design looks at the major decisions and activities making the model and the project itself suitable to the context and profiles of those it is intended for. The analysis of how the course unfolded shows flexibility during its development in order to adapt it to the gaps found in certain aspects of local infrastructure, communication (social and cultural aspects), learning strategies, evaluation and the time scale of the course. To be highlighted among the final conclusions, we have on the one hand the results obtained as regards the students following and finishing the course and, on the other, the confirmation of the methodology used (blended learning) as the basis of an educational project of this sort.

Full text in Spanish (PDF, 153 Kb)

I think of the potential online volunteer as the eternal excluded from cooperation for development, as a kind of “market” yet to be discovered.

When I say “eternal excluded” I dont’ mean he or she never took part in any project or organization in the field of cooperation for development, he surely did. What I mean is that he surely had to abandon because of other (most important) social commitments.

Lets take three main factors: age, time and space.

Age factor

There’re four main age groups in volunteering:

0 to 16: too young to have a real engagement with anything. Can be a volunteer, but yet too immature to carry the weight of real responsibilities

16 to 25: quite an adult. Can carry on with volunteering responsibilities and, most important: (usually) has plenty of time to “waste” with others, as he is normally an student or apprentice and has not a lot of other responsibilities

25-65: married or with formal engagement; sons or family duties; work, work and more work. Not a lot of time to spend with others, specially time to “give away”. Would volunteer, but how and when? What a pity: he’s got training and he’s got experience. He’s got knowledge but a difficult way to share it with others. The potential online volunteer?

65-over: he’s got plenty of time and a lot of experience. He’s surely the new cluster of (“real”) volunteering and, why not, virtual volunteering. But he’d maybe prefer personal contact. Besides, it’s possible his experience is a little bit out of date if he did not keep a long life learning/training in his expertise field.

It seems to me that groups 2 and 4 make up the normal “real” volunteers while the third group is the natural virtual volunteer.

Time factor

Having familiar responsibilities shortens our disposal of time.
Having professional responsibilities shortens our disposal of time.
Our preferred NGO is open when at work.
When home, no time to volunteer because it’s time to be with his or her children, couple, do some housework, etc.
And when he or she, at last, can spare some time to volunteer, where to? Whom with?

Space factor

Same happens with the question “where to volunteer” in the preceding example.

But there are other reasons besides family and work not to be able to go where you can volunteer: crossing the ocean or the continent is, besides a matter of time, a matter of money. And sometimes it is even a matter of infrastructures: no road, no trip.

Adding up:

• The online volunteer is a knowledge centred volunteer
• The online volunteer is a volunteer with independence of time
• The online volunteer is a volunteer with independence of space

[This is part of what I said at the First International Congress about E-Learning and social inclusion. I’ll try and gather all up and put it in the form of an article. In the meanwhile, I’ll publish it as a normal post by little pieces :P ]