Micro-volunteering

Micro-volunteering describes a task done by a volunteer, or a team of volunteers, without payment, either online via an internet-connected device, including smartphones, or offline in small increments of time, usually to benefit a nonprofit organization, charitable organization, or non-governmental organization. Micro-volunteering is a form of virtual volunteering. It typically does not require an application process, screening or training period, takes only minutes or a few hours to complete, and does not require an ongoing commitment by the volunteer.

Micro-volunteering has been practiced informally and on an ad-hoc basis, with nonprofits involving volunteers in short-term, low-commitment assignments via the Internet for some time^[1], though it was the San Francisco-based social enterprise called The Extraordinaries (now renamed as www.Sparked.com), founded in January 2008, which popularised this form of volunteering with their smartphone app in early 2009, that made microvolunteering accessible to any nonprofit with an internet connection.^[2][3][4]

However, it was the Spanish microvolunteering website Microvoluntarios.org who first registered the phrase microvolunteering, albeit the Spanish version, as a web domain name on 27 Nov 2006^[5], that created the first working publicly accessible online microvolunteering platform in May, 2008^[6]. This was then followed by (Help From Home) in December, 2008 who began to document the diversity of microvolunteering actions available on the internet.

There are several definitions of the term microvolunteering in use, these being: - 'Easy quick low commitment actions that benefit a worthy cause' (Help From Home) - 'Convenient bite-sized crowdsourced and network managed' (Sparked) - 'The act of voluntarily participating in day-to-day situations that occupy a brief amount of time' (Student Volunteer Connections)

There has been some dispute as to the impact that microvolunteering actually achieves. One research study^[7] shows that an action on its own can risk being seen as fairly inconsequential, but en masse it can have a huge impact. Another study^[8], published in early January, 2012 indicated that people seemed to be genuinely interested in participating in microvolunteering as it was easy to do and didn't seem to intrude into people's perceived busy lives.

See also

• Crowdsourcing
• Slacktivism
• Volunteer
• Distributed computing
• List of distributed computing projects
• Volunteer computing

References

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