December 30, 2019: In 2019, more than 150 people volunteered in Knowbility's Accessibility Internet Rally, where teams of web designers and developers (volunteers) work remotely and build accessible websites for nonprofits and artists (clients), accessibility expert mentors (also volunteers) guide the teams, and judges (also volunteers) review finalized websites and pick winners. For this latest event, that added up to more than 4000 hours of donated time. Volunteers and clients walk away from the event with more awareness about accessibility as well practical experience in effective virtual teamwork - and Knowbility hopes the volunteers have more appreciation for the arts and nonprofits as a result of their participation. Here's a video of two volunteers talking about their experience building a website for an NGO in Congo, including dealing with a huge time difference, power outages in Congo, creating a site in two languages. And Team Hoosiers, a group of volunteers in Indiana, created a video to introduce themselves and their client, Emerson Academy. Jayne notes: "I know about this program because I have participated in it on and off over the years - including now, as I update this blog. And I've always had great luck asking online volunteers to create simple videos!"

Dec. 11, 2019. When Yahoo announced that everything that had ever been uploaded to their very popular Yahoo Groups platform would be “permanently removed” on Dec. 14, Jason Scott rallied his team of online volunteers, who he calls “rogue archivists, programmers, writers and loudmouths dedicated to saving our digital heritage” to try to preserve data. The group has spent a decade hopping from one online obliteration to the next, capturing whatever they can in the Wayback Machine. The Archive Team, as his group is known, keeps a “Deathwatch” of websites in various stages of shutdown (“Likely to Die,” “Dying,” “Dead as a Doornail”). It's the latest cause for ad hoc networks of digital archivists who want a system of better record keepers for a world increasingly lived online. Scott estimates the team’s numbers at a few hundred people, but there is no official roster. These archivists say Yahoo has blocked their attempts at coordinated preservation of the Yahoo Groups forums, deepening their frustrations. Story in the Washington Post.

December 2019. MENTOR, formerly the National Mentoring Partnership, has published free online this E-Mentoring Supplement to the Elements of Effective Practice for Mentoring (PDF). Those not cited in the publication, the nonprofit's first exploration of online mentoring was in 1999 with the Virtual Volunteering Project.

October 14, 2019. Someone wrote to Energize asking: I am specifically looking for information on laws regarding virtual volunteers. If a volunteer living in one state is a virtual volunteer for a nonprofit in another state, which state’s laws protect the volunteer should a legal issue arise. Energize asked Jayne to respond and so she did in this blog.

May 17, 2019: Per an email received by Jayne Cravens, the Dear Professor Einstein project from Oregon State University is no longer recruiting online volunteers, because online volunteers have finished transcribing all of the scanned letters they have relating to atomic science and American history. The Wiki is awaiting news regarding how many online volunteers were involved, how long the project took, any particular challenges the project had to overcome for its successful completion, how online volunteers were recognized/thanks, etc.

May 15, 2019: A recording service in Kentucky called Radio Eye engages close to 200 volunteers to give about 10,000 listeners information from newspapers across Kentucky and beyond. volunteers are responsible for about 4,000 hours of programming a year. They record themselves reading the paper and the reading is streamed on air or posted as a podcast. Volunteers can read in the service's two studios in Louisville and Lexington, or in the privacy of their own home. Most volunteers can get through a recording in about 45 minutes to an hour. Readers just need a smartphone and tablet or computer to read from. To volunteer, visit radioeye.org/volunteer and fill out an online volunteer application. To listen to a stream, visit Radio Eye: Ways to Listen.

28 February 2019: Hacking the Past: An Archives Game Jam was held in over the weekend of 23-24 February in London, England. The key objective of the onsite hackathon was the gamification of the task of transcription of historical documents. The onsite volunteer participants were challenged to create an imaginative game that makes the task of transcribing historical documents for online volunteers fun and efficient, thereby inventing Games With a Purpose (GWAP) that combine computer processing with human expertise to make transcription as easy, accessible and entertaining as possible. About 40 attendees, including two experienced online volunteers who had participated in Transcribe Bentham, an award-winning initiative which is crowdsourcing the transcription of philosopher and reformer Jeremy Bentham’s previously unpublished manuscripts. At the hackathon, there was also support staff from The National Archives and the UCL Centre for Digital Humanities (UCLDH). Online volunteers have transcribed more than 20,000 pages of Bentham’s writings.

24 February 2019: Susan Ellis has passed away. Susan J. Ellis, the co-founder of the Virtual Volunteering Wiki, co-author of The Last Virtual Volunteering Guidebook, and the world's foremost expert on volunteer management, passed away peacefully at a hospice in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. In lieu of flowers, donations can be made to the Susan J. Ellis Foundation

22 February 2019: #WIKI4WOMEN is a virtual volunteering initiative led by UNESCO and Wikimedia Foundation celebrating International Women's Day 2019, 8 March 2019. The initiative calls volunteers around the globe to take a few minutes of their time to create, enrich or translate, in as many languages as possible, Wikipedia profiles of women committed in the fields of education, science, culture, social and human sciences, or communication and information. Here's a summary of the event & some resources to help participants, as well as links to official information.

16 January 2019: Becoming a digital humanitarian, one deployment at a time. "Nine years ago, a devastating earthquake hit Haiti, and I was among many looking for meaningful ways to help, albeit from far away. That's how I became involved in the world of digital humanitarianism, once unknown to me, which revolves around one thing only: information management." This excellent essay by Melissa Elliott for ReliefWeb talks about all of the various virtual volunteering initiatives she has participated in to support communities far from her that are experiencing the aftermath of natural disasters.

10 January 2019: Online volunteers are tagging photos of wildlife for Minnesota. Scientists have amassed more than 1 million photos of Minnesota wildlife over the past year, and online volunteers are tagging them. “I like this idea that I’m helping scientists,” said Teresa Root, who works as a naturalist at Dodge Nature Center and Preschool in West St. Paul. “I’ve done over 5,000 images in the last two weeks. It’s very addictive.” Multiple people are classifying each set of photos, with scientists using algorithms to then extract the most common or likely answers. This will create a database that is easy to search. In similar projects, scientists have found that volunteers produce answers that rival the experts. “It’s really a wisdom of the crowds,” said Meredith Palmer, a postdoctoral researcher involved in the Cedar Creek project. One warning about this article: the article site is packed with click bait and advertising.

4 January 2019 The Evolution of Emergency Copernicus services (E2mC) project provided an update on its workshop on the use of social media and crowdsourcing for disaster management in December in Slovenia. E2mC aims at demonstrating the technical and operational feasibility of the integration of social media analysis and crowd-sourced information within both the Mapping and Early Warning Components of Copernicus Emergency Management Service (EMS). The Project will develop a prototype of a new EMS Service Component (Copernicus Witness), designed to exploit social media analysis and crowdsourcing capabilities and to improve the timeliness and accuracy of geo-spatial information provided to Civil Protection authorities, on a 24/7 basis, during the overall crisis management cycle and, particularly, in the first hours immediately after the event. This will result in an early confirmation of alerts from running Early Warning Systems as well as first rapid impact assessment from the field. E2mC was born out of the GeoTag-X project, which operated from 2014 to the end of 2017. "We want to teach you, our volunteers, to recognise the important information in a photo and create relevant, structured datasets that can be used by those working on the ground in the response." As the GeoTag-X program ended, online volunteers were analyzing photos related to the Ebola response, emergency shelter assessment in the Middle East, Yemeni Cultural Heritage at Risk (because of the war), Yamuna Monsoon Flooding from 2013, the Somali Drought, pollution, and the condition of animals and livestock. The project lead for GeoTag-X was the United Nations Institute for Training and Research (UNITR). To see the original GeoTag-X web site, go to archive.org / the Internet Archive and paste this URL into the search: http://geotagx.org

More recent news regarding virtual volunteering.

2021 articles.

2020 articles (there's a LOT).

2018 articles.

2017 articles.

2016 articles.

2015 articles.

2014 articles.

Articles earlier than 2014 (going back to 1996)

Detailed information about how to use the Internet to support and involve volunteers - virtual volunteering - can be found in The Last Virtual Volunteering Guidebook. This wiki is a supplement to the book - but no substitution for it. 

Join our virtual volunteering LinkedIn group (you must be a member of LinkedIn to join this group; membership is free) to know when the Virtual Volunteering Wiki is updated.

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Please note: this wiki project is entirely unfunded - and I'm struggling to keep it going. If you would like to see this page continue to be updated, here's how to support this work.