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Local reflects national state of online volunteering

| January 15th, 2011

It was great to see this interview with Paul Wilson, deputy director of Edinburgh Volunteer Centre from Jonathan Melville in the Guardian Local.

In the interview Paul talks about changes in volunteering in Edinburgh and more broadly in Scotland. He talks about developments in online volunteering and gives the example of how the Volunteer Centre in Edinburgh recruited a volunteer to help with their internal database management.

It’s interesting that when he moves on to micro-volunteering, the discussion becomes hypothetical. In a way this kind of represents where the UK volunteering sector as a whole is at, in terms of its experience of using new technology in volunteering. We’re comfortable talking about the role and status of volunteering in UK communities.

Most of us now have had at least ad hoc experiences of using new technology directly in helping to develop and broaden volunteering. However, when it comes to using new tech in very specific user cases such as mobile based micro-volunteering, the general experience is still tentative.

Always interesting to hear about the opportunities and new developments from Help from Home, i-volunteer and other sources. It will be interesting to see what responses the appeal in the Government’s Green Paper on giving gets on the subject.

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Posted on Saturday, January 15th, 2011 at 1:58 pm in Volunteering | rss feed for comments| You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

  • http://twitter.com/robjackson74 Rob Jackson

    I think one of the reasons people are tentative about things like micro-volunteering is that those who evangelise about it can’t actually point to much evidence of its impact. It strikes me as funny (peculiar) that at a time when we’re being told we have to show more and more evidence the impact of volunteering, the micro-volunteering evangelists keep telling us we have to adopt this new way of working yet don’t seem to have that evidence of impact themselves.

    In my view, micro-volunteering is an interesting and exciting new development that has lots of potential. But, at the moment is seems to be more about the fact that we can do it rather than convincing me we should do it.

  • paddaniels

    Thanks Rob for your comment.

    I guess your point about evidence of impact was one of the reasons I found Paul’s comment interesting. When I saw the title of the piece I thought it would be about Paul talking about their experiences with micro-volunteering, but when I listened to it he was just talking about it in a hypothetical context.

    I think micro-volunteering as a context holds out a lot of potential for helping us rethink with volunteering. But like you, I think that the experience that there is is not that widespread in the UK volunteering community. However, I also think we should be looking for opportunities to try out and experiment with some of the possibilities on offer here from micro-volunteering: such as fomenting ‘macro’ volunteering and for scaling participation across communities and networks more effectively. Although there are still not that many examples of people using mobile technology in this way, we do have plenty of examples of how people have used the web in this way. The idea of small calls to action that scale as more people get involved, is a principle has all kinds of achievements to its name from Wikipedia through to Mozilla Firefox, from the Grameen Bank through to the development of mountain bikes. If however the question is how has mobile technology enabled this stuff- there are of course plenty of questions. But there are also interesting examples we can learn from such as http://www.ushahidi.com and http://www.frontlinesms.com

    We’re in interesting times – there is still loads to discover – loads to think through and create – and may be then in a few years from now we’ll have much more substantial evidence of impact.