I’m looking for photos of people who help nonprofit organizations, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), grassroots organizations, schools, or other civil society organizations (CSOs) via a computer at their homes, their work, a computer cafe, a cell phone/smart phone — as a volunteer (that means unpaid, NOT as a paid staff member or paid consultant).

You know: online volunteers. Virtual volunteering. Online mentoring. Cyber service. Microvolunteering. Crowd-sourcing. Clowd computing volunteering. Whatever the hot new term is.

I need photos of people who research information, design web sites, databases or graphics, prepare proposals, edit documents, translate text, offer professional advice, moderate online discussion groups, contact the press write newsletter articles, manage web sites, manage Flickr accounts, edit podcasts or online videos, or any other activities to help organizations that support causes those people believe in – but these people perform their service as a volunteer (unpaid!) from a remote site.

Why? I want to feature them at this Flickr Group, “Online Volunteers.”

These don’t have to be volunteers who help ONLY via the computer; most online volunteers also help onsite as well. So if the volunteer helps only half the time, or a quarter of the time, online, that’s fine! It still counts!

Photos or video of online volunteers should be taken either via your webcam or with the computer or other Internet device you use somehow visible in the photo, to give it that “Internet” feel. ALSO, describe what you do as an online volunteer, including either the name or a description of the organization(s) you support. If you really can’t work a computer into the photo, then at least make the description ultra-obvious about why you are submitting the photo.

ALSO, please tag your photo “online volunteer.”

Submit the photos directly to the Flickr group for online volunteers– which means you will need a Yahoo ID. If you don’t already have such, and don’t want one, you can send ONE photo to me, via email, however, please clearly note in your email who you are, why you are sending the photo, etc.; blank emails, or those with sketchy descriptions, will be discarded without viewing (to protect myself from computer viruses). Photos that don’t clearly represent online volunteers will be rejected.

Please forward this message to volunteers you work with, or anyone you think might be interested.

Goal: to show the diversity of online volunteers out there. The practice of online volunteering is more than 30 years old. I want to show just what a HUGE group of people volunteer online, and have been doing so for a long while now!