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So much of what the press and bloggers herald now as pioneering<\/em>\u00a0or disruptive<\/em> 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.\n\nMany tech pioneers and early tech history have been forgotten, and web sites that detailed these efforts are gone, sometimes not even available on the - \n \t
- Early History of Nonprofits & the Internet<\/a><\/b>\nThe 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<\/a>. 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.<\/li>\n \t
- What Was NetAid?<\/a><\/b>\nFirst 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.<\/li>\n \t
- Impact Online: A History<\/a><\/b>\nImpact 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.<\/li>\n \t
- Al Gore Campaign Pioneered Virtual Volunteering<\/a><\/b>\nBack 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.<\/li>\n \t
- A history of the Smart Valley initiative<\/b><\/a>\nIn 1994, perhaps earlier, an initiative called Smart Valley<\/a> 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 Jos\u00e9, 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.<\/li>\n \t
- San Francisco Women of the Web (SFWOW): A History<\/a><\/b>\nIn 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.<\/li>\n \t
- United Nations Technology Service (UNITeS)<\/a><\/b>, 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.<\/li>\n \t
- United Nations Tech4Good \/ ICT4D Initiatives<\/a><\/b>, 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?).<\/li>\n<\/ul>\nIf you are a Wikipedia\u00a0volunteer, 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\u00a0contributors, or those perceived as such, have a MUCH easier time of it on Wikipedia than females.\n\nAlso see:\n\nWikipedia needs improvement re: volunteerism-related topics<\/a>\n\nWhy Do So Few Women Edit Wikipedia? Insights into virtual volunteering<\/a>\n\nCrowdsourcing \/ Hive Mind \u2013 it\u2019s been happening since at least 1849!<\/a>\n\nHistory & Evaluation of UNV\u2019s Early Years<\/a>\n\nvolunteers scramble to preserve online data before government deletes it<\/a>\n\n\n
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<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n \n\nIf you have benefited from this blog or other parts of my web site<\/a> and would like to\u00a0support<\/a> the time that went into\u00a0developing material, researching information, preparing articles, updating pages, etc., here is how you can help<\/strong><\/a>.\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"So much of what the press and bloggers herald now as pioneering\u00a0or 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[14],"tags":[51,139,250,2001,881,1999,2000,477],"class_list":["post-4369","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-tech-tools","tag-apps4good","tag-cyberspace","tag-ict4d","tag-information-superhighway","tag-netaid","tag-smart-valley","tag-tech-women","tag-tech4good"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3fFJB-18t","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/coyotecommunications.com\/coyoteblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4369","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/coyotecommunications.com\/coyoteblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/coyotecommunications.com\/coyoteblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/coyotecommunications.com\/coyoteblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/coyotecommunications.com\/coyoteblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4369"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/coyotecommunications.com\/coyoteblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4369\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4754,"href":"https:\/\/coyotecommunications.com\/coyoteblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4369\/revisions\/4754"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/coyotecommunications.com\/coyoteblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4369"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/coyotecommunications.com\/coyoteblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4369"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/coyotecommunications.com\/coyoteblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4369"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
- What Was NetAid?<\/a><\/b>\nFirst 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.<\/li>\n \t