After four months of research, I now have a table listing more than 50 NGO or charity initiatives in Europe that are known to be involving online volunteers, or organisations outside of Europe that are known to involve online volunteers from the EU – this is a part of a larger EU project I’ve been working on.

This table is not a comprehensive list of every charity, non-governmental organization (NGO) or other initiative in Europe involving online volunteers — many organisations work with online volunteers and don’t know it, because they call their volunteers just volunteers, not necessarily online volunteers, or don’t use phrases like virtual volunteering or microvolunteering – there are a lot of organizations engaged in these activities that don’t use these terms, at least in my observations.  Rather, this list is meant to highlight the prevalence of Internet-mediated volunteering in Europe.

U.K. and Spain are VERY well represented in the list. However, my research turned up little information about Internet-mediated volunteering in France or in other French-speaking regions in Europe. A search of keywords related to this subject on Google, including:

• bénévolat virtuel
• bénévolat enligne
• bénévolat Internet

turned up just one short web page on the primary volunteering portal of France, France Bénévolat, which linked to Canadian materials regarding virtual volunteering (in French)

So – why do you think that is?

Spain, meanwhile, exceeds the U.K. and Ireland in terms of virtual volunteering (voluntarios en línea / voluntarios digitales / voluntarios en red). Why do you think THAT is?

I’m sure there’s so many, many more than what I’ve listed on the table – but, unfortunately, I don’t speak Estonian, Polish, Hungarian…