Tag Archives: hackathon

UN innovation events show how far they’ve come re: ICT4D

The change is stunning. And welcomed.

Back in 2001, my first year working as an employee of the United Nations, I was a part of a little department of six people (and various interns over the years) within UNDP/UN Volunteers, managing two projects: the Online Volunteering service (then part of NetAid) and the Secretary General’s United Nations Information Technology Service (UNITeS). Our team could not have been more excited to talk about virtual volunteering, technology for development (ICT4D), ICT4D projects by volunteers in the fieldhandheld computer technologies in community service/volunteering/advocacy, citizen-designed tech solutions, using tech to work with remote volunteers, crowd-sourcing for development (though we didn’t call it that then), south-to-south knowledge exchange ONLINE, hacks 4 social change (though we didn’t call it then), and other tech4good activities to anyone who would listen! It was an incredible four years of my life.

Unfortunately, many of our UN colleagues never understood our projects – or our boundless enthusiasm for such. Despite our events, workshops, one-on-one meetings, online resources, singing and dancingdrums, support from the Secretary General, Kofi Annan, whatever else we could think of, our activities were met with eye rolls by many of our colleagues. By the time I left that assignment, the new head of UNV (now long-gone) was proudly proclaiming that most of our initiative’s activities, save the online volunteering service, were finished – not because they had met their goals, but because they weren’t needed, and never had been. Even the UNITeS web site was taken off-line for a few months (hence why I keep a version here). Our team went its separate ways.

UNDP innovation logoNow, 13 years after we came together in Bonn, Germany and tried to get the rest of the UN excited about our crazy ideas, and nine years after most of our activities were ended, it’s fascinating to see UNDP in particular fully embracing those ideas: The UNDP SHIFT campaign, focused on innovation (and many of the ideas we tried to promote back at the start of the century – see graphic at left), is the week of 22 September 2014, headquartered in New York City (the “Social Good” summit) but happening all over the world, including here in Kyiv, Ukraine (details soon!).

We can’t take any credit for this change happening, of course. But my colleagues can feel good to know that we weren’t quite as crazy as people thought we were – we we really were on to something worth pursuing by the UN. We were just a decade or so early!

(although… we were pretty crazy…)

Somewhere, Sharon Capeling-Alakija is smiling.

where are the evaluations of hacksforgood/appsforgood?

Just found this out: the city council of Ivano-Frankivsk, a municipality in Western Ukraine, initiated a project for the creation of a mobile app to improve service delivery and expand opportunities for collecting the public’s feedback. On 18 January 2014, UNDP help to launch the app, making it available for free on Google Play. “Containing information about the city, its executive authorities, and a useful telephone directory of 500 contacts of relevant public authorities, the app also provides easy access to municipal emergency services. Crucially, it also allows citizens to report cases of corruption via 14 different anti-corruption hotlines at local, regional, and national levels. The claims and petitions filed will be addressed within the legally established timeframe of 30-45 days.” Here’s the official story from UNDP Europe and Central Asia.

Ukraine really is quite a tech-savvy country – as I mentioned earlier, re: the late Ukrainian journalist Ihor Kostenko, who was killed earlier this year in a Euromaidan protest, being named Wikipedian of the Year for 2014. And, as you may recall, I blogged earlier about the development of a citizen reporting system for post-conflict areas in Ukraine, one that could be accessed by a computer or a smart phone, where citizens could report on a particular issue, and these reports could be mapped and shared, etc.

But with all that said, just as with app launches and hackathons / hacks4good in the USA, there seems to be no followup. Are any of these apps4good projects sustainable? Are there more users of the apps now? How many cases of corruption have been reported to date with this particular app that was launched earlier this year? Has the app – or any apps six months later – been improved in any way? Has any hackathon products or apps4good had any evaluation yet and, if so, what are the results?

I’ve been trying to find examples of citizen reporting apps being used by governments to respond to citizen reports – about illegal waste dumps, infrastructure issues, misuse of official vehicles, whatever, in any country. And so far… I’m finding only stories about the launch of the app. Like this one in Montenegro. In addition to getting answers to the questions in the aforementioned paragraph about all these apps for good, I’d like to read a success story about the government being responsive to the data generated. It seems to me some of the requirements for this to happen would be:

  • the government designating an office and at least one staff position as being responsible for reading every submission, evaluating it, passing it on to the appropriate people for action, and following up to make sure action was taken – and if not, getting back to the reporting citizens as to why not.
  • the office and staff people assigned to be responsible for reading and responding to the data generated by the citizen reporting app being evaluated regarding their performance in responding to the information, and that evaluation being made public.

I did hear of one project in Kyiv, where citizens can report housing problems via a web site, and, according to the person that referred such to me, it is actually working: “There is a system that a person leaves a request (reports a problem), the housing department employee checks it, and fixes the problem and reports back on it.” So it seems to be working exactly because it’s addressed the two aforementioned bullet points – or, as my colleague put it, “such a system can work only with local authorities, who will implement the projects, and have access to the ground, and resources.”

It’s wonderful to see so many tech4good / apps4good / hacks4good initiatives anywhere in the world, Ukraine or otherwise, but I fear we’re spending all our attention on their launch, and not nearly enough on their impact and sustainability. And if we don’t focus on those things, then they are just tech fluff.

Greetings from Ukraine.

Are you a web designer? Then this is for YOU

The Accessibility Internet Rally is the centerpiece project of the nonprofit organization Knowbility.org, based in Austin, Texas. It’s my favorite corporate volunteering event, my favorite group volunteering event, my favorite tech volunteering event, and my favorite episodic volunteering event. And now that it’s available to anyone to participate online, it’s poised to become my favorite online volunteering event!

The Open Accessibility Internet Rally (OpenAir) is an international community hackathon with a unique twist – accessibility! OpenAIR increases awareness of the tools and techniques that make the Internet accessible to everyone, including people with disabilities, and it also enhances participants’ accessible design skills. Unlike other hackathons, the things that get developed at this event are used LONG after the event is over! Unlike other hackathons, this event changes people and the way they work for years to come.

Experts in the accessibility field will act as mentors during the competition – that’s some primo networking! Truly, participate in this, and you increase your own marketability as a web designer!

Added bonus: this year, OpenAIR has added new game elements, leaderboards, and fabulous prizes.

OpenAIR begins in October and wraps up with an awards ceremony in February. Requirements to participate:

  • Skilled in web production: Designers, developers, QA testers, we’re looking at you!
  • Passionate about making a difference: Help non-profits, create inclusive content, empower everyone to access the web.
  • Eager to learn: You’ll receive amazing training and support: prepare to be challenged!
  • Ready to level up: You don’t mind getting a little glory for your skills and your team.

If this describes you or your team, don’t miss out! There are limited spots, and the competition is just about to start. This year’s OpenAIR kicks off at the Google campus in Austin, TX in October, streamed live across the world.

Reserve your team on OpenAIR now! (The first 10 teams that sign up receive a custom game avatar for the competition)

Don’t have a team? Don’t think you can put together a team on your own? Still want to participate as a designer? No problem! Register as an individual and Knowbility will help you join a team!

Are you a nonprofit that wants to be the recipient of an OpenAIR web design/collaboration? Register here.

How I ended up at a Philly Tech4Good event

When I get to travel for work outside of my home near Portland, Oregon, I do a search on Google and Twitter to see what people and organizations might be worthwhile to connect with while in a particular area. I look for volunteer centers, international nonprofits, nonprofit development/support centers, nonprofits focused on computers and the Internet in some way, and academics that have done research or teach regarding nonprofit management or international aid work. I write each of those organizations, departments or people and ask if we could meet, just so I can hear about their work and so I can offer any advice or resources, in an informal setting.

Sometimes, my schedule fills up quickly, and I get to meet face-to-face with people I might never get to meet otherwise. Other times, I get confused email responses from people that find this old-fashioned “networking” idea as oh-so-strange.

Last week, I went to Philadelphia to present for the Mennonite Central Committee (MCC)’s  US National Thrift Shop Conference, about trends in volunteer engagement. I also contacted a few nonprofits, university offices and government offices to see if they would like to meet. The organizers of Philly Tech Week said yes (thank you, Brian James Kirk and Corinne Warnshuis!).

Philly Tech Week featured an event on the campus of Temple University while I was in the area:  Exploring Civic Volunteering With Technology: Kickoff for Commit Service Pledge. The event was to launch the Commitpledge.com web site that asks Philadelphia-area nonprofits to post tech-related volunteering opportunities, and for volunteers to offer their expertise through the web site to help with those opportunities.

The event also featured a panel discussion by Jeff Friedman, the new Director of eGovernment Business Development at Microsoft and recently a part of the Philadelphia Mayor’s Office of New Urban Mechanics, Mayo Nissen, a New York-based designer who has been involved in urban improvement initiatives involving technology, and Anthony Pisapia, Associate Executive Director of Tech Impact, the nonprofit behind npCloud and VolunteerConnect.

The panelists talked not just about how tech helps nonprofits, but also how it helps governments better engage and support citizens – too many of tech-for-good initiatives leave out government programs, IMO, so this was great to hear.

Some good questions were asked, including:

  • How can big data help more in helping citizens?
  • How do we make products that result from hackathons sustainable?
  • How do we better address the disconnect between tech and who it should serve?

A moment I loved was when, in response to several panelist comments about how to find out what the community needs, an audience member said “Go to city council meetings!” She’s so right – nonprofits and individual citizens are being loud and clear about their needs, in government meetings, in their own meetings, on newspaper Facebook pages, on government program Facebook pages, and on and on. Quit wondering and start reading and listening!

My favorite moment, however, was when Anthony Pisapia said “Nonprofits are geniuses at innovation, but maybe not at technology.” I’ll be quoting this again and again! He’s absolutely right: nonprofits have expertise, and their staff and volunteers do amazing things with very little resources. In fact, they have as much, if not more, to teach the corporate, for-profit world as the other way around! Too many tech folks think nonprofits are incompetent or inefficient; in fact, nonprofits are some of the most innovative entities around.

There was also the inevitable questions of “What’s the difference in a social entrepreneur and a volunteer? Actually, what is a volunteer? Is our goal that, eventually, everyone gets paid for their work?” As I was an observer and outsider, I didn’t enter into that discussion during the event, but afterwards, did my best to answer the question one-on-one. That may turn into a blog…

If you will be in the Portland, Oregon area, and want to meet with me, contact me! Just tell me who you are, what your area of work is, and what you would like from me in terms of a face-to-face discussion.

I write a LOT about tech-related volunteering. Here are some of my resources:

 

Advice for hackathons / one-day tech events looking for projects to hack

In a conversation with a friend participating in Myanmar’s first-ever hackathon to benefit causes or nonprofits, as well as reviewing recent, similar hackathons all over the world, and other one-day tech events for good like edit-a-thons, it seems to me that the easy elements of putting together these events is securing a space for the event and getting skilled volunteers for such, but the much harder part is identifying projects for these volunteers to work on.

I’m also wondering if any of these projects get evaluated six months or a year down the road, to see if the organization or cause that had an app or web site or database or whatever developed has benefited from the development. For instance – are these apps that are developed actually used six months later?

My favorite hackathon is Knowbility’s Accessibility Internet Rally, which brings together web developers, as volunteers to both learn accessible design techniques and then apply those techniques to building web sites for nonprofit organizations. It’s my favorite because the event is always so much fun, the volunteer web designers take the skills and knowledge they learn from the hackathon back to their workplaces, and the nonprofits still love their web sites many months later.

But it’s pretty easy to sell the idea to nonprofits of volunteer web designers re-creating their web sites. My review of hackathons and edit-a-thons shows that identifying other projects, like apps development, is MUCH more difficult. If you walk into a nonprofit and say, “Do you want an app to help you in your work?” most nonprofits won’t have an answer. Same if you say to most nonprofits, “What wikipedia pages do you wish had better info related to your organization’s mission?”

So I’ve been thinking: how can hackathon or edit-a-thon organizers identify projects or causes for the event? Here are some of my initial ideas. Please add more!

  1. Research nonprofits in your community, and get a sense of how many they are. If you are in a small town, you may want to make a list of every nonprofit in your town (which you can find on Guidestar) and then do some research to see which are active (do they have a web site? does the org’s name come up in a Google or Bing search? Can you find an email address for the org?). If you are in a large city, don’t be under the illusion that you can reach every one of them – even big cities with nonprofit associations cannot say that every nonprofit is a member.
  2. Ask organizers what nonprofits they work with in any way – as a volunteer, as the spouse of a volunteer, as an event participant, etc. In short, look for nonprofits where someone involved in your event already has a personnel connection.
  3. Review what apps previous hackathons elsewhere have created for nonprofits, or what edit-a-thon efforts have benefited nonprofits. Also see this very long list of apps that have been developed for specific nonprofits. Would such app development be appropriate for any nonprofits in your community, at least in theory?
  4. Meet with nonprofits more than once, and with as many different staff members as possible. Just sending an email announcing the event won’t be enough to get nonprofits interested in participating. Sit down with nonprofit representatives face-to-face and speak in non-tech language as much as possible. And remember that different staff members will have different ideas for needs – for instance, here is a list of apps I envisioned that managers of volunteers might want/need.
  5. Don’t meet with any nonprofit that you haven’t gotten to know via its web site – you want to already have an idea of what the nonprofit does, whom it serves, its mission, etc. You may want to do a mapping exercise with the nonprofit regarding how it reaches and serves clients, to identify ways an app or database might help. When asking them what their biggest challenges are, you might want to add “except for fundraising” because fundraising will almost always be the #1 challenge for every nonprofit, and most participants in hackathons want to work on projects related to nonprofit missions/programs, rather than fundraising (at least that’s my experience).
  6. Have a list, in writing, of what a nonprofit would be committing to if they decide to participate. What are the dates and times nonprofit staff would need to meet with organizers and to be onsite at the event? How many hours do you estimate their participation will require? What are your expectations of the nonprofit after the event in terms of evaluating whatever is developed as a result of your event?
  7. If you want to create a smart phone app, have data to show nonprofits that demonstrates that a significant number of potential volunteers, potential clients, and current volunteers and clients, have smart phones. If you cannot prove this, most nonprofits are not going to be interested in investing in smart phone app development.

Those are some of my ideas. What are yours? Share them in the comments here on my blog, or on this thread on TechSoup.

One (-ish) Day “Tech” Activities for Volunteers

A new resource on my web site:
One(-ish) Day “Tech” Activities for Volunteers
Volunteers are getting together for intense, one-day events, or events of just a few days, to build web pages, to write code, to edit Wikipedia pages, and more. These are gatherings of onsite volunteers, where everyone is in one location, together, to do an online-related project in one day, or a few days. It’s a form of episodic volunteering, because volunteers don’t have to make an ongoing commitment – they can come to the event, contribute their services, and then leave and never volunteer again. Because computers are involved, these events are often called hackathons, even if coding isn’t involved. They also sometimes get called edit-a-thons. This page provides advice on how to put together a one-day event, or just-a-few-days-of activity, for a group of tech volunteers onsite, working together, for a nonprofit, non-governmental organization (NGO), community-focused government program, school or other mission-based organization – or association of such.

Open Air Hackathon – Nonprofits Get Web Sites, Designers Get Accessibility Training

The Accessibility Internet Rally is a community hackathon with a unique twist – Internet accessible for everyone, including people with disabilities.

AIR benefits nonprofit organizations and schools in any community by providing them with free, professionally designed, accessible websites.

AIR benefits participating volunteers, who are web designers, by providing them with increased awareness of the tools and techniques that make the Internet accessible to everyone – including people with disabilities – thereby increasing skills they can take back to their work places.

The result: dozens of professionally designed, accessible websites for nonprofit groups, and web designers with new skills and understanding regarding accessible design and usability.

Open AIR Registration for both nonprofits that want web sites and teams is NOW.

The competition – the hackathon — begins October 23, 2013 (& and lasts a month).

If you are a web developer, professional or aspiring (but with the needed skills), sign up a team of three to six members via the online developer registration. Besides helping nonprofits and learning new skills, you will also get the opportunity to win tickets to SXSW Interactive 2015 in Austin, Texas.

As a participant and competitor you will:

  • Be matched with a non-profit organization, budding artist, or worthy community organization (though you can also help a nonprofit register and be asked to be matched with that particular nonprofit)
  • Create an exciting, interactive web experience that is accessible to everyone.
  • Network with area artists, web professionals, and other really cool people.
  • Get to complete your development project in a more relaxed time frame – unlike past events that happened in one day, onsite, the development cycle is 30 days for Open AIR and can be done from your own location, giving your team the opportunity to create something really special fromanywhere.
  • Have access to training worth over $4,000

Don’t have a team to register with? Submit an individual registration and we will work to place you on a great team. Knowbility recommends a $25.00 donation to support the Open AIR program in lieu of a team registration fee for individual registrants.

Fees are $100 for the first 4 team members, $125 for teams of five, $150 for teams of six.

For nonprofits: register for free and if you are selected, a $100 registration fee will be due.

The Accessibility Internet Rally is open to participants in three categories:

  • Community Organizations: to qualify in this category, entities must be either a 501(c)(3) not-for-profit organization or an entity that exists for community benefit such as a church group, an arts organization, or a performance organization, to be decided at the discretion of the Organizer.
  • Web design team: to participate in this category, a group of up to 6 web and related professionals sign on as a team. Each web design team shall be considered a single Entrant. No person may enter more than once, either individually or as part of any team. If an Entrant uses the name of a corporation, partnership or other legal entity, the Entrant certifies it has the permission of the entity to do so.
  • Individual web professional: Individuals may sign on to participate and will be matched to other individuals at the discretion of the Organizaer to create a Web Design Team.

All Entrants must be officially registered to participate in the competition.

Entrants will be given access to a collection of online resources (training) to help them build accessible Web sites. Entrants will be expected to read and familiarize themselves with these resources prior to the Rally.

Entrants are required to submit their Entries in accordance with a mechanism determined by the Organizer This mechanism shall include instructions for preparing files for upload, file specifications including file type and file size and location for uploading.

Here are the complete details of participation, including team commitments.

Here is registration info for both teams and nonprofits.

Pioneering in “hacks for good”: Knowbility

Hackathons, hacks for good, hackfests or codefests are quite the buzz words these days.

There are a lot of new initiatives getting a lot of attention for mobilizing people with high tech skills to help various causes at individual events: these initiatives bring these people together to spend the day, or maybe a few days in a week, at computers, usually in one big room, with everyone using their skills to do good, eat some good food, take lots of fun photos of everyone in action, and celebrate the great work at the end of the day.

Good stuff. But one of the first organizations to do this, Knowbility, gets lost amongst the much better-funded, higher profile newcomer groups, and it’s such a shame, because more people really should get to know Knowbility!

AIR Houston 2007

Knowbility is a national nonprofit organization based in Austin, Texas that creates technology programs that support independent living for people with disabilities, including veterans. Knowbility’s signature event is its Accessibility Internet Rally (AIR) – a hackathon that brings together teams of web designers to learn about web design accessibility standards, and then to apply those standards in a competition to create web sites for nonprofit organizations. The result of an AIR event isn’t just a fun day and new web sites; all participants walk away with an understanding of web design accessibility standards they didn’t have before that they can apply to their daily professional work, and the volunteer teams, most of them from the corporate sector, learn about the unique work of nonprofit organizations, creating opportunities for better partnerships in the future.

Knowbility’s activities have earned all sorts of awards and recognition – like the Peter F. Drucker Foundation Recognition for Nonprofit Innovation. On September 21, 2000, the White House issued a press release to highlight programs across the country that are helping to bridge the digital divide for people with disabilities and Knowbility’s AIR event in Colorado was mentioned by President Clinton as a new and noteworthy initiative. And I’ll never forget when they got mentioned at the end of Oprah’s talk show, resulting in an onslaught of emails and phone calls and oh-so-much excitement.

Knowbility earns more than 60% of its revenue through fee-for-service offerings. But that means it still relies heavily on grants and donations. Knowbility is worth your financial support. I really want this organization to continue – more than that, I actually want this organization to launch more AIR events and other activities all over the USA, and beyond! Knowbility is worth your investment.

And if you have ever been involved with Knowbility in any way, consider blogging about your expereince, talking about it on your Facebook status update or Twitter feed or Google Plus profile or other social media profile, and linking to the donation page.

Here are some other blogs I’ve written about Knowbility:

Hackathons for good? That’s volunteering!

Volunteer online & make web sites accessible

Hackathons for good? That’s volunteering!

I recently tweeted out this message to my Twitter followers, and a few other people retweeted it to their own followers as well.

(you can follow me on Twitter here)

My goal was to write a detailed blog about all these different hackathons for good, and maybe even develop a web page on how to organize these kinds of episodic volunteering events (group volunteering events that don’t require a long-term commitment, that require just one day, or just a few days, of participation) related to technology.

Unfortunately, I have not had any response yet… but I’ll go ahead and blog about the examples I know about, and hope it leads to more examples:

The first event I ever attended that brought lots of web designers into one room, or one site, at multiple computers, to do something to help others for a few hours, was a web-building event by the Metropolitan Austin  Interactive Network (MAIN) in Texas in the 1990s. These web-raisings don’t happen anymore, at least not by MAIN, but what’s replaced it in Austin is something even better: the Accessibility Internet Rally, or AIR Austin, by Knowbility. This competitive event not only helps nonprofits get web sites – it also helps educate web developers and nonprofits about web accessibility for people with disabilities. It’s my favorite volunteering event – the perfect combination of fun, food, volunteering and making a difference. It’s so successful that not only does it happen year after year (it started in the late 1990s), not only do many of the web designers come back year after year to volunteer for the event, but the event happens in other cities as well.

I think Knowbility’s AIR events are the perfect hackathons, because they not only get work done – they also educate the participants about a critical issue. That isn’t just awareness – it’s transformative. The experience affects the web designers in how they approach their work when they get back to their day jobs. They design differently, and they think of nonprofits differently.

Hackathons have been around since the 1990s, but just the practice, not the name; now with its new branding, this form of episodic volunteering seems to be becoming all the rage.

One of the most high-profile hackathon groups is the nonprofit Crisis Commons, which produces “hybrid barcamp/hackathon events which bring together people and communities who innovate crisis response and global development through technology tools, expertise and problem solving.” Crisis Commons co-hosted the Random Hacks of Kindness (RHoK) event with Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, NASA and the World Bank in 2010, with events taking place in cities around the world including Nairobi, Jakarta, Sydney, Washington DC and San Paolo. Software developers, usability experts, emergency planners, technologists, “social media knowledge workers,” project managers, NGOs and university professors met in each of the cities to volunteer or, as Crisis Commons put it, to “crowdsource open source solutions to very real humanitarian problems. There are seven main projects ranging building SMS applications to report amputee needs, near real-time UAV imagery processing to creating a people finder application.” Geeks Without Bounds (GWOBorg) has been a part of several Crisis Commons activities.

Also new on the scene of hackathons for good is Code for America, which, among many activities, hosts or co-hosts hackathons where developers and designers come together in, say, 24 hours, to “build applications for social change” and, sometimes, compete for prizes. Code for America offers its own suggestions for ingredients for a successful hackathon, based on its own experiences.

Jumping on the hackathon bandwagon as of 2007 is GiveCamp, which “a weekend-long event where technology professionals from designers, developers and database administrators to marketers and web strategists donate their time to provide solutions for non-profit organizations.”

Also new on the scene is Data Without Borders, which hosts various kinds of hackathons, also called Data Dives, that provide nonprofits with data analysis (data collection, analysis, visualization, and decision support) by volunteer “data scientists.”

Also listen to this presentation from SXSW about a hackathon in San Francisco related to DonorsChoose.org.

One thing that is both amusing and sad to me about all these hackathon events is that these organizations rarely use the terms volunteers or volunteering. The people contributing their time and talent are teams or pro bono researchers or Data Heroes – anything but volunteers! Very strange… and sad.

Anyway…

If you know of other hackathons for good, hacks4good, hacks for good, onsite crowdsourcing – whatever you want to call these volunteering events – please note the names of such in the comments section of this blog. Web addresses would be particularly helpful!

Also see:

Short-term assignments for tech volunteers

My voluntourism-related & ethics-related blogs (and how I define scam)

 

Short-term tasks for tech volunteers

There are a variety of ways for nonprofits, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), schools, government agencies and other mission-based organizations to involve volunteers to help with short-term projects relating to computers and the Internet, and short-term assignments are what are sought after most by potential “tech” volunteers. But there is a disconnect: most organizations have trouble identifying short-term tech-related projects.

Back in 2005, myself and by members of TechSoup Global’s Volunteers and Technology online discussion group brainstormed a list of short-term projects for tech volunteers. I’ve added a lot to it over the years – and just updated the list yet again this week.

These one-time, short-term volunteering assignments might takes a few days, a couple of weeks or maybe a month to complete. But each has a definite start date and end date, shouldn’t go on longer than a month (maybe two) and does not require a volunteer to make an ongoing commitment to the organization – once an assignment is done, the volunteer can move on to another assignment, or stop volunteering with the organization altogether.

There are also many long-term, ongoing assignments for tech volunteers, of course, such as web design, web site management, being on-call for tech problems, backing up systems, producing live online events, etc. But before an organization involves volunteers in such high-commitment endeavors, the organization should consider creating a few short-term assignments, to get used to working with tech volunteers and to help staff identify the best candidates for longer-term assignments.

Tags: volunteering, volunteers, episodic, microvolunteer, microvolunteering, engagement, engage, community, outreach, staff, employees, civil society, technology, help, IT, ICT, ICTs