Micro-volunteering: Helping the helpers in development

Abstract

Finding and retaining volunteers is a challenge for most of the NGOs (non-government-organizations) or nonprofit organizations worldwide. Quite often, volunteers have a desire to help but are hesitant in making time commitments due to busy lives or demanding schedules. Micro-volunteering or crowdsourced volunteering has taken off in the last few years where a task is divided into fragments and accomplished collectively by the crowd. Individuals are only required to work on small chunks of tasks during their bits of short free times during the day. This panel brings in an interesting mix of researchers from the crowdsourcing/ development space and social entrepreneurs to discuss the pros and cons of micro-volunteering for non-profits and identify the missing blocks in enabling us to replicate this concept in developing regions worldwide. Copyright © 2012 by the Association for Computing Machinery, Inc. (ACM).