Tag Archives: tech4good

Apps4Good should be based in reality, not be tech fluff

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I sent out this tweet thread December 3 from my Twitter account:

Listened to a podcast by someone wanting to develop an app to address a particular community need. He has no stats regarding the need, no research showing his approach is what partner agencies or potential clients want. Just talked about #app4good he’ll develop. (1/5) #CSR

This project leader has no experience regarding this particular community need. None. It’s another case of someone from the corporate world deciding that he knows what nonprofits or at-risk community members need, with no data or research to back that up. (2/5)

Looked at the web site. It’s very slick, uses all the buzzwords. You have to really read (which most folks won’t) to realize every project is in development, that no people with actual expertise in this issue are involved in this supposed nonprofit effort. (3/5)

It’s great that folks from the corporate / business / tech world want to help with community issues. Your involvement is vital. But just as you have to do your homework before developing an app for consumers, you have to do research before you develop an #app4good. #CSR (4/5)

Years of experience in the tech sector doesn’t prepare app creators for addressing homelessness, hunger or street harassment, or navigating mass transit, or working in emergencies. You must talk in-depth with the experts: nonprofits & their clients. (5/5)

I’ve written a LOT about how folks from the corporate world, from executive directors to app developers, don’t talk to nonprofits before they develop tech tools for their clients. Here’s more:

And then there is this brilliant tweet from World Bank Water, an initiative of the World Bank:

To paraphrase a comment I wrote in a previous blog, it’s wonderful to see so many tech4good / apps4good / hacks4good initiatives anywhere in the world, but I see way too much attention being spent on their launch, on their promise, and not nearly enough researching if this is really what clients or the community wants, let alone evaluating their impact and sustainability after launch. And if we don’t focus on those things, then they are just tech fluff.

Milestone: more than 100 virtual volunteering research articles

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As of October 2020, a milestone has been reached regarding virtual volunteering: I’ve found more than 100 research articles, dating back to 1997 and most with a university association, related to virtual volunteering. These are all listed here at the Virtual Volunteering Wiki.

I started tracking published research regarding virtual volunteering – using the internet to engage and support volunteers – when I directed the Virtual Volunteering Project at the University of Texas at Austin. I began heading the project in December 1996 and within several months of looking, I not only had found about 100 programs, most at nonprofits, a few at schools, that were involving online volunteers, I also realized that the practice was at least a couple of decades old, first starting at the Project Gutenberg, a volunteer effort that began in 1971 to digitize, archive and distribute the full texts of public domain books, such as works by Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Mark Twain. But what I had trouble finding was academic research on the subject. I had found a fair amount by the time The Last Virtual Volunteering Guidebook was published, but even so, it seemed still to be rather on the lean side for a practice that was so well-established.

I had no funding to research and write The Last Virtual Volunteering Guidebook, and I’ve had no funding to continue maintaining the Virtual Volunteering Wiki, which tracks news and research regarding using the Internet to engage and support volunteers. But, indeed, I’ve maintained the wiki all these years, focusing on things that I deemed newsworthy and, especially, academic research. When I realized that there are now more than 100 research articles, dating back to 1997 and most with a university association, related to virtual volunteering, I felt it was worth celebrating. And this is just the English-language material: I bet there is a fair amount in Spanish, given Spain’s leadership in virtual volunteering for a couple of decades now.

Note that sometimes research articles do not call the unpaid contributors or unpaid virtual team members “volunteers.” For instance, any research paper on Wikipedia contributors could be considered research on virtual volunteering, as Wikipedia contributors – Wikipedians – are unpaid by Wikimedia for those contributions.

Also note that many of the papers make the mistake of talking about virtual volunteering as new, ignoring or overlooking its more than three-decade history. When I read that this is a “new” practice in an academic paper recently published, especially a thesis or dissertation, it makes it very hard for me to take the rest of the research seriously. I wish more university professors would catch that inaccurate point of view early on in a PhD student’s exploration of the subject.

It’s so wonderful to see that virtual volunteering now has a rich research history to go along with its rich history of practice, and I love reading perspectives about virtual volunteering by people who ARE NOT ME. Look, it’s been fun to be the world’s expert regarding virtual volunteering, but I’m so hungry to read perspectives by other people, particularly regarding what works best in supporting online volunteers, particularly different demographics of such volunteers – is it different to involve teen online volunteers in India versus tech-savy senior volunteers in Germany? Is there something that works well supporting online volunteers in South Africa that is different than what’s done in Spain? Is engaging and supporting rural online volunteers different from engaging and supporting urban or suburban online volunteers, even in the same country? I’d love to see such comparative studies!

What’s not needed? Research on the motivations of people who volunteer online. Good grief, people, ENOUGH!

I would also love beyond words if a university would step forward and be willing to take over management of the Virtual Volunteering Wiki. Having university students and faculty maintaining this would make it a much more rich and valuable resource. Any takers?

Let me be frank: I’m going to eventually retire. I’ll always be interested in virtual volunteering, and I’ll be an online volunteer myself for, I hope, decades to come (in between my extensive motorcycle riding). But just as there is no one Queen or King of All Things Volunteer Management, there shouldn’t be just one person, or always the same person, keeping track of news and research regarding virtual volunteering and distilling the key points of such. It’s overdue for new leaders, and a diversity of new leaders, to emerge in this field. I stand ready to support those new leaders (or, at least, figuratively – I can’t stand as long as I used to).

If you have benefited from this blog or other parts of my web site and would like to support the time that went into researching information, developing material, preparing articles, updating pages, etc. (I receive no funding for this work), here is how you can help. 

What’s New Regarding Virtual Volunteering

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Despite lack of funding, I do my best to keep tabs on what’s going on regarding virtual volunteering: initiatives using the Internet to support and involve volunteers. What I’m particularly interested in are virtual volunteering activities that are new to me, are particularly innovative or particularly successful. I have a series of Google Alerts I use to keep tabs on news stories, press releases and blogs that use certain words and phrases that are good leads on virtual volunteering – remember, most initiatives that involve online volunteers never use the phrase virtual volunteering, and maybe not even the word volunteer.  That makes finding stories quite difficult.

I keep a list of news regarding virtual volunteering on the Virtual Volunteering Wiki. I did an analysis of this by year and found that 2014 and 2015 were prolific years regarding news related to virtual volunteering, but that after that, the number of stories I’ve found drops each year. Why the drop in stories about virtual volunteering each year for the last five years? I think it’s because there’s not that much that seems newsworthy about virtual volunteering anymore – after all, virtual volunteering is more than 35 years old.

I also use my news searches to update this web page that lists Virtual Volunteering initiatives, to help those looking for online volunteering. While my book with Susan J. Ellis, The Last Virtual Volunteering Guidebook, is focused on helping organizations engage and support volunteers using the Internet, this page is meant to help people that want to be online volunteers. It lists more than 100 places to find virtual volunteering opportunities, and some of the sites I link to, in turn, list dozens, even hundreds, of organizations recruiting online volunteers.

In maintaining this list and in searching for virtual volunteering news, I’ve seen that, in the last five years, there has been a proliferation of opportunities for online volunteers to transcribe scanned historical documents or to tag photos. Examples:

The Old Weather project, where online volunteers transcribe hand-written weather observations made by Royal Navy ships around the time of World War I; using old weather observations can help predict our climate’s future.

Decoding World War I Punchcards, to help tag digitized punch cards that represent soldiers in World War I served by the YMCA, housed at the Kautz Family YMCA Archives, University of Minnesota Libraries. 25,926 men and women are represented by these cards. By digitizing these cards and having them properly tagged, this project seeks to shed light on these individuals and make freely available the biographical and demographic information contained within these cards.

The Freedom on the Move (FOTM) public database project at Cornell University mobilizes online volunteers to add data tags and transcribe scans of newspaper advertisements offering rewards for the capture of fugitive slaves – enslaved Americans seeking freedom and, often, their families. The resulting database will allow users to examine spatial patterns and compare trends over time.

These virtual volunteering transcription and tagging programs used to be few and, therefore,  newsworthy. One of the things that made them newsworthy is that they are microvolunteering or microtasks: a volunteer can spend just a few minutes accomplishing something, or spend hours transcribing and tagging. Now, there’s well more than 100 such programs – Zooniverse alone provides links to more than 80 such projects. There’s just nothing really new or innovative anymore about microvolunteering. But it is addictive: I lost a lot of time trying out one of these programs and one project turns into 20 – it’s better than CandyCrush!

What innovation is needed regarding virtual volunteering? A way for online volunteers to participate in these microvolunteering tasks in a way that the time they spend on them and their accomplishments could be automatically tracked, resulting in a report the volunteer could show as he or she wants to: on social media, to a high school administrator who wants to see the number of volunteering hours a student has undertaken or to a probation officer or other officer of the court who wants to see the number of community service hours a person has completed. If some aspiring hackathon or socially-responsible company or whatever wants to create this tool, just give me credit for the inspiration, please?

If you have benefited from this blog or other parts of my web site and would like to support the time that went into researching information, developing material, preparing articles, updating pages, etc. (I receive no funding for this work), here is how you can help.

Also see:

Pioneering Internet Initiatives Deserve To Be Remembered

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So much of what the press and bloggers herald now as pioneering or disruptive on the Internet isn’t at all. In 1995, I was talking online with friends, old and new, in all the ways I do now, with the exception of live video: we were writing messages in real-time and messages posted somewhere to read later. We were making and sharing audios and videos. We were creating communities. We were using online tools to train, to learn, to change minds, to promote ideas and to research. The names of the tools have changed, and they have all definitely gotten more sophisticated, but rarely do I read an article about something new online and find that, in fact, it really is something new, innovative, or disruptive. Many tech pioneers and early tech history have been forgotten, and web sites that detailed these efforts are gone, sometimes not even available on the Wayback Machine (archive.org). In addition, attempts to preserve some of this important, rich early Internet history on Wikipedia often get wiped out by veteran Wikipedeans who don’t think the entries are worth remembering – especially if the entries involve women primarily. There are certain tech-related initiatives from the 1980s, 1990s and early 2000s that I think are worth not only remembering but worth reviewing and mining for lessons we can use right now – and worth celebrating. I also think the people involved in these early initiatives are worth looking up by researchers and the press alike, to find out what they think about where our networked world has been and where it might be going. Below is a list of pages on my web site that are a part of my attempts to preserve some of this important history and to make it more findable on various search engines. Note how most are focused on nonprofit and government initiatives, rather than for-profit companies – just like those that created the Internet:
  • Early History of Nonprofits & the Internet The Internet has always been about people and organizations networking with each other, sharing ideas and comments, and collaborating online. It has always been interactive and dynamic. And there were many nonprofit organizations who “got” it early — earlier than many for-profit companies. So I’ve attempted to set the record straight: I’ve prepared a web page that talks about the early history of nonprofits and the Internet. It focuses on 1995 and previous years. It talks a little about what nonprofits were using the cyberspace for as well at that time and lists the names of key people and organizations who helped get nonprofit organizations using the Internet in substantial numbers in 1995 and before. Edits and additions are welcomed.
  • What Was NetAid? First there was Band Aid, then Live Aid, and Farm Aid, and then came NetAid, an initiative that was also launched with celebrity-laden concerts and a great deal of media coverage. The NetAid initiative was meant to harness the Internet to raise money and awareness for the Jubilee 2000 campaign, to raise awareness for the challenges in developing countries, and to allow people to volunteer online, donating their skills to help people in the developing world. NetAid’s goal was to make global philanthropy more efficient. This page reviews who was involved, how the initiative evolved, and its legacy regarding virtual volunteering.
  • Impact Online: A History Impact Online was a nonprofit organization founded in the mid 1990s. It was one of the first web sites, and maybe the first web site, where nonprofits could post their volunteering opportunities and people that wanted to help could sign up to help. It later became VolunteerMatch. Unfortunately, someone requested that old versions of the Impact Online web site be removed from the Internet Wayback Machine, and so all archives of the original web site are gone. Luckily, I downloaded some of text and graphics from that original, pioneering web site. I’m sharing them here because the original Impact Online initiative deserves to be remembered and honored.
  • Al Gore Campaign Pioneered Virtual Volunteering Back in 2000, when Al Gore ran for president, his campaign championed virtual volunteering by recruiting online volunteers to help online with his election efforts. I’ve tried to present some of what his campaign did – this pioneering effort deserves to be remembered, as do some of the lessons from such.
  • A history of the Smart Valley initiative In 1994, perhaps earlier, an initiative called Smart Valley was launched in California. Smart Valley was a 501(c)(6) nonprofit organization focused on creating an “information infrastructure” in Silicon Valley, California – Palo Alto, Mountain View, Sunnyvale, Cupertino, San José, Santa Clara and the surrounding area, creating projects to enhance the quality of life in Silicon Valley. Smart Valley’s projected included SmartSchools NetDay and PC Day, Smart Voter, to help people learn about upcoming elections, Connect 96: The Global Summit on Building Electronic Communities, the Public Access Network (PAN), a Telecommuting Initiative, and the Smart Valley Webmasters Group. Smart Valley was also affiliated with the nonprofit organization Plugged In, one of the first digital divide efforts, working to bring “the tremendous technological resources available in the Silicon Valley to youth in low-income communities” in East Palo Alto and SV-PAL, the Silicon Valley Public Access Link.
  • San Francisco Women of the Web (SFWOW): A History In the 1990s, various associations sprung up all over the USA to support women using the Internet as a primary part of their work – or who wanted to. These associations created safe, supportive, content-rich, fun spaces, both online and in real spaces, for women to talk about their tech and online-related work, to ask questions, and to learn from each other. One of the best well-known at the time, San Francisco Women of the Web, chose 25 women in 1998, in 1999, in 2000 and in 2001, recognizing them with their Women of the Web award. To help highlight some of the many women who played important roles in the 1990s Internet – which I consider the “early days” – as well as some truly pioneering tech projects that laid the groundwork for the success of so many initiatives today, I have reproduced this list of Top25 Women on the Web on my own site.
  • United Nations Technology Service (UNITeS), a global volunteer initiative, created by Kofi Annan in 2000, that both supported volunteers applying information and communications technologies for development (ICT4D) and promoted volunteerism as a fundamental element of successful ICT4D initiatives. It was administered by the UN Volunteers program, and during the tenure of UNITeS, the UNV program helped place and/or support more than 300 volunteers applying ICT4D in more than 50 developing countries, including 28 Least Developed Countries (LDC), making it one of the largest volunteering in ICT4D initiatives. The activities of UN Volunteers, as well as those by tech volunteers working through NetCorps, CompuMentor, the Association for Progressive Communications, Australian Volunteers International, NetCorps, Voluntary Service Overseas (VSO) and Volunteers in Technical Assistance (VITA), were tracked and promoted by UNITeS as part of its overall mission. Part of the UNITeS mandate was to try to track all of the various tech volunteering initiatives and encourage them to share their best practices and challenges with each other. UNITeS was discontinued as an active program in 2005.
  • United Nations Tech4Good / ICT4D Initiatives, a list of the various United Nations initiatives that have been launched since 2000 to promote the use of computers, feature phones, smart phones and various networked devices in development and humanitarian activities, to promote digital literacy and equitable access to the “information society,” and to bridge the digital divide. My goal in creating this page is to help researchers, as well as to remind current UN initiatives that much work regarding ICT4D has been done by various UN employees, consultants and volunteers for more than 15 years (and perhaps longer?).
If you are a Wikipedia volunteer, I encourage you to try to create and maintain entries for the initiatives named on these pages, especially if you are male or perceived as male online – male contributors, or those perceived as such, have a MUCH easier time of it on Wikipedia than females. Also see: Wikipedia needs improvement re: volunteerism-related topics Why Do So Few Women Edit Wikipedia? Insights into virtual volunteering Crowdsourcing / Hive Mind – it’s been happening since at least 1849! History & Evaluation of UNV’s Early Years volunteers scramble to preserve online data before government deletes it
If you have benefited from this blog or other parts of my web site and would like to support the time that went into developing material, researching information, preparing articles, updating pages, etc., here is how you can help.

Proliferation of SmartPhones leads to proliferation of rape videos

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I have talked with women who help manage or even just use community tech centers all over the world – in Egypt, Afghanistan, Jordan and various countries in Africa – and very often, they have told me something that they never put into a program report for UNDP or whomever was funding the center: that the men and boys coming to the center used the computers to view porn more than any other subject.

This story from the BBC has brought this memory back to me. Here’s an excerpt:

…even as it becomes easier to access pornography thanks to cheap data and smartphones, there is concern that this isn’t being accompanied by any meaningful understanding of sex and relationships. Local boys in the village freely admitted to the BBC that they watched videos of molestation and rape. One 16-year-old said he had seen more than 25 such videos, adding that his friends often shared them on their smartphones.

Sunita Krishnan, the founder of Prajwala, an organisation in the southern city of Hyderabad that deals with issues of sexual violence and trafficking says these violent videos reinforce the old belief that a woman’s choice is insignificant and she has no agency.

This earlier story from BBC about the kidnapping, rape and murder of a child talks about some of the reasons for the attitude in the country about women.

India is not alone when it comes to high rates of incidence of rape. But many believe patriarchy and a skewed sex ratio may be making matters worse. There is public apathy as well: the rights and security of women never become election issues.

This story for INews by Divya Arya gives more background:

India has seen an internet revolution of a different kind in the past few years. Low-cost smartphones, cheap data and popular social media apps have enabled vast rural parts of the country to stream videos like never before. Pornhub, widely reported to be the world’s largest porn website, claims that India is now the third largest consumer of its content in the world after the United States and United Kingdom. The majority of its content in India is accessed using mobiles.

For many young Indian men, their introduction to sex is the first time they watch porn. India does have an Adolescent Education Program but implementation remains a challenge and girls and boys rarely mix with each other in smaller cities and villages. As I started travelling and talking to young men about this for a new BBC World Service documentary airing as part of the 100 Women season, the impact of watching porn in the absence of real interaction with women became clear. It was not only leading to objectification of women in their mind, but also re-enforcing the entitlement men have traditionally felt on women’s life decisions. In marriage, motherhood and desire to work, women remain secondary citizens…

Multiple men confirmed to me that videos of molestation, and professionally shot violent pornographic content, both were the most searched content online in cities as well as more rural areas. As more violent content became available, watching simple sex stopped being the preference for many. These men confided about wanting to replicate what they saw online and some of them explained that it did affect their personal relationships adversely.

Clicked on a link within the original story about a related story and it opened with a situation that sounded all too familiar to me:

On his many trips to Internet cafes in the bustling central Indian city of Indore, lawyer Kamlesh Vaswani discovered what he calls the “epidemic” of pornography.

“I would go to download important Supreme Court judgments, and pornographic adverts would pop up instead. And when I looked around, I saw rows of children surfing porn openly without a care in the world,” 

There are calls for bans on porn but there are fears this will lead to banning sites regarding sexual health, even breast cancer.

Here’s an hour-long documentary from BBC’s 100 Women series about the proliferation of online porn in India via smartphones.

I’m glad to see the discussions about what to do about the massive increase in the use of smartphones and social media leading to widespread myth-spreading and all of the consequences of that – but what about this very real issues of these online tools being used to promote and encourage violence against women?

Also see:

Many app4good efforts fail to get stakeholder input: lessons from UNHCR

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Developed in a ‘bubble’, many apps that were developed by various IT dogooders for refugees duplicated existing well-used communication platforms. They didn’t take into account complex issues of trust, how information (or rumors) spread, nor how rapidly the political and protection landscape changed. There was also demonstrated naivety around data protection and the political sensitivity related to information being shared.

“I definitely don’t want to disparage the motivations nor the commitments demonstrated by thousands of volunteers during in Europe. But, ‘tech-led solutions’ to complex challenges failed to solve the significant communication issues.”

Katie Drew of the United Nations High Commission on Refugees (UNHCR) writes a much-needed piece about the many apps4good / tech4good efforts launched to help migrants that didn’t last past their splashy launches. She also provides helpful advice for future efforts. Her advice is applicable to ANY hackathons / hacks4good that think a room full of IT folks can solve an issue faced by migrants, people experiencing homeless, women facing domestic violence, or any mission of a nonprofit or non-governmental organization.

Also see:

Holiday gift idea for anyone that works to make a difference

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Looking for a gift for someone in your life that works with volunteers, either as a volunteer themselves or as an official manager of such? Or a gift idea for someone studying for a degree in nonprofit management? Or anyone working at a nonprofit, a non-government organization (NGO), or a government program that engages volunteers?

May I not-so-humbly suggest The Last Virtual Volunteering Guidebook?

The book is available for purchase in paperback or as an ebook (PDF) from Energize, Inc., the world’s largest publisher of books regarding volunteer engagement. The book is written by me and Susan Ellis, and is the result of more than 20 years of research and experience regarding virtual volunteering – also known as online micro volunteering, crowd sourcing, digital volunteering, online mentoring and on and on – yes, there are a lot of different names for the various manifestations of online service.

Did you know that virtual volunteering was a practice that was more than 20 years old? You would if you read the guidebook!

This book is for

  • both for practitioners and for academics that do research regarding volunteering.
  • both for people brand new to recruiting and supporting volunteers and for those that are veteran managers of volunteers
  • both for people brand new to virtual volunteering and for experienced managers who are looking for confirmation they are on the right track or information to help them make the case to expand their programs.

Susan and I wrote The Last Virtual Volunteering Guidebook in such a way that it would be timeless – as timeless as a book about using computers, laptops, smart phones and other networked devices could be. We didn’t want it to be out-of-date in just a few months. That’s not easy when it comes to technology, but we gave it a try – and four years later, it still reflects what works, and what doesn’t, in working with volunteers online. In fact, as I’ve said before, I use it as a reference myself – there are times I’m asked a question about working with volunteers online, or facing a dilemma regarding working with volunteers myself, and I go back to the book to see what we said – and, tada, there’s the answer!

The Last Virtual Volunteering Guidebook details the basics for getting started with involving and supporting volunteers online, but it goes much farther, offering detailed information to help organizations that are already engaged in virtual volunteering with improving and expanding their programs. It offers a lot of international perspectives as well.

The book includes:

  • Detailed advice on virtual volunteering assignment, including one-time “Byte-Sized” tasks (micro-volunteering), longer-term, higher-responsibility roles and virtual team assignments.
  • A thorough look at various practices for screening and matching volunteers to assignments, with an eye to getting the most capable volunteers into your volunteering ranks and preventing incomplete assignments or burdensome management tasks
  • How to make online volunteer roles accessible and diverse
  • More details about how to work successfully with online volunteers, so that they are successful, your organization benefits and volunteer managers aren’t overwhelmed
  • Ensuring safety – and balancing safety with program goals
  • Respecting privacy of both the organization and online volunteers themselves
  • Online mentoring
  • Blogging by, for and about volunteers
  • Online activism
  • Spontaneous online volunteers
  • Live online events with volunteers
  • The future of virtual volunteering and how to start planning for oncoming trends

There’s also a chapter just for online volunteers themselves, which organizations can also use in creating their own materials for online volunteers.

In conjunction with the guidebook, we’ve maintained the Virtual Volunteering Wiki, a free online resource and collaborative space for sharing resources regarding virtual volunteering.

Here’s why we called it the LAST guidebook and reviews of The Last Virtual Volunteering Guidebook.

The Last Virtual Volunteering Guidebook is available for purchase in paperback or as an ebook (PDF) by Energize, Inc.

If you read the book, I would so appreciate it if you could write and post a review of it on the Amazon and Barnes and Noble web sites (you can write the same review on both sites).

A history of “Smart Valley”

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I recently wrote (and published on my web site) a history of Smart Valley, a 1990s initiative in Silicon Valley, California to create an “information infrastructure” to benefit people, communities, governments & businesses.” Smart Valley was an initiative of Joint Venture: Silicon Valley. It was a 501(c)(6) nonprofit organization focused on creating an “information infrastructure” in Silicon Valley, California – Palo Alto, Mountain View, Sunnyvale, Cupertino, San José, Santa Clara and the surrounding area.

Smart Valley’s many activities included coordinating SmartSchools NetDay II and PC Day in Silicon Valley, creating an Internet Technical Guidebook for Schools, leading a Smart Voter campaign to help people learn about upcoming elections by leveraging online sources (one of the first of such initiatives), creating and supporting the Public Access Network (PAN), hosting Connect 96: The Global Summit on Building Electronic Communities, promoting telecommuting, hosting a monthly series of lectures, Smart Talks, that featured “leaders of the growing information infrastructure”, and hosting the annual Smart Valley Corporate Executive Forum “to touch base with the senior executives of our member companies to review the year’s progress and to explain our plans for the future.”

Among its affiliated projects, many of which originated at Smart Valley and were spun off as independent initiatives:

  • ABAG, Association of Bay Area Governments
  • BAMTA, The Broad Alliance for Multimedia Technology and Applications
  • BADGER, The Bay Area Digital Geographic Resource
  • CommerceNet, “the premier industry association for Internet Commerce”
  • Plugged In, one of the first digital divide efforts, working to bring “the tremendous technological resources available in the Silicon Valley to youth in low-income communities” in East Palo Alto (you can see archived versions of this initiative at archive.org by searching pluggedin.org before 2012)
  • SV-PAL, the Silicon Valley Public Access Link, is a non-profit volunteer organization which brings Internet access to the South Bay community including local schools, organizations, businesses and individuals.

Why do I care about the history of Smart Valley? Because I was the internal communications manager for Joint Venture in 1995-1996. Smart Valley is one of Joint Venture’s pioneering initiatives that has disappeared from the Internet and is rarely referenced these days, which is a shame, because it was a pioneering effort. I wasn’t involved with Smart Valley, but I really admired what it was doing.

I would have written the Smart Valley history at Wikipedia, but I’m worried it will just get deleted by some guy who decides it isn’t worthy of a Wikipedia entry…

Also see:

  • Early History of Nonprofits & the Internet
    The Internet has always been about people and organizations networking with each other, sharing ideas and comments, and collaborating online. It has always been interactive and dynamic. And there were many nonprofit organizations who “got” it early — earlier than many for-profit companies. So I’ve attempted to set the record straight: I’ve prepared a web page that talks about the early history of nonprofits and the Internet. It focuses on 1995 and previous years. It talks a little about what nonprofits were using the cyberspace for as well at that time and lists the names of key people and organizations who helped get nonprofit organizations using the Internet in substantial numbers in 1995 and before. Edits and additions are welcomed
  • Lessons from NetAid and onlinevolunteering.org
    Some key learnings from directing the UN’s Online Volunteering service from February 2001 to February 2005, including support materials for those using the service to host online volunteers.
  • United Nations Tech4Good / ICT4D Initiatives
    a list of the various United Nations initiatives that have been launched since 2000 to promote the use of computers, feature phones, smart phones and various networked devices in development and humanitarian activities, to promote digital literacy and equitable access to the “information society,” and to bridge the digital divide. My goal in creating this page is to help researchers, as well as to remind current UN initiatives that much work regarding ICT4D has been done by various UN employees, consultants and volunteers for more than 15 years (and perhaps longer?).
  • Al Gore Campaign Pioneered Virtual Volunteering
    Back in 2000, when Al Gore ran for president, his campaign championed virtual volunteering by recruiting online volunteers to help online with his election efforts. I’ve tried to present some of what his campaign did – this pioneering effort deserves to be remembered, as do some of the lessons from such.

List of my books, papers, citations in other publications

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I have no idea why I haven’t done this before: I’ve made a list of my own publications (many available for purchase, as well as books, white papers, academic papers, etc. that quote me or cite my work, going back to 1999.

vvbooklittleMy most well-known traditional publication is The Last Virtual Volunteering Guidebook. This book, which I co-wrote with Susan J. Ellis, is our attempt to document all of the best practices for using the Internet to support and involve volunteers from the more than three decades that this has been happening. Whether the volunteers are working in groups onsite, in traditional face-to-face roles, in remote locations, or any other way, anyone working with volunteers will find The Last Virtual Volunteering Guidebook helpful. The book is available both in traditional print form and in a digital version.

 

Accessibility: a human rights & a digital divide issue too many ignore

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If your initiative has a mission regarding human rights or the digital divide, shouldn’t that include a web site that is accessible for people with disabilities or using assistive tech?

I’ve made a less-than five-minute video talking about why. I captioned it using the YouTube closed captioning tool, which is AMAZING: