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Donating Time To Goodwill Projects?
jukal asks: "I am in the process of writing a proposal for co-operation between Openchallenge and UNITeS (United Nations Information Technology Service) which is 'creating a global volunteer programme aimed at bridging the digital divide between industrialized and developing countries'. Currently & traditionally contributing as a volunteer means relocating yourself to the developing country to take part as a project developer/manager/specialist. My proposal to UNITeS is, in short, will be that people could participate in such software projects via Openchallenge - while staying in their home country, on their spare-time and while keeping their jobs. The local team in the developing country would, after defining and creating requirements specifications post sub-projects as tasks to Openchallenge. All the contributions submitted to Openchallenge are published under an open source license. My question is: would you for example consider donating some hours to help a goodwill project - if you could do that from home. This is of interest to me, as I would like to be sure that the time we put into building co-operating with a big organization like UNITeS and others in the future. Is not wasted. There is this thread about 'Volunteer Work Abroad' - which is good reading related to the subject. But it did not quite provide me with the answer."
IANATA (I am not a tax attorney), but from what I understand, you cannot deduct the value of donated time. If you mow lawns for a living and make $10 an hour, if you mow a lawn for charitable purposes you can only deduct the expense of the gasoline (and perhaps the depreciation on the lawnmower, but de minimus).
As for hard $$$, that's definitely deductible as long as it's a legal charity, as far as I know.
If your bitterest enemies are people who hack the heads off civilians, then I would say you're doing something right.
MIT's Technology Review article on the state of high technology in Ghana should be required reading for the original poster, and all those interested in the subject of technology in the third world. The content of the article should give considerable pause to any clueless individual thinking that happily hacking away in their living room is going to substantially impact the living conditions of those living in the third world. While the article points out the immense promise of technology for the third world (one man interviewed had never received a piece of snail mail in his life, but had internet access, and could read news from around the world), that promise largely remains unfulfilled. The author states
Making a telephone call here requires persistence. Roughly half don't go through because of system failures, but that's only the start of Ghana's telephone woes. The country has a mere 240,000 phone lines--for a population of 20 million spread across an area the size of Britain. Moreover, telephone bills are inaccurate, overcharges common, and the installation of a new line can cost a business more than $1,000, the rough equivalent of the annual office rent. Lines are frequently stolen, sometimes with the connivance of employees of Ghana Telecom, the national carrier. Phones go dead, and remain unrepaired, for months. Some businesses hire staff for the chief purpose of dialing numbers until calls go through.
Moreover, even those fortunate enough to have access to the internet find themselves distraught by the knowledge of the incredibly poor conditions in which they must live. One internet cafe owner stated that the majority of users were online in his cafe trying to figure out a way out their country.
The upshot is that much more effort needs to be devoted towards basic infrastructure -- sanitary, transportation, and information -- before an idea like that of the poster's would make much sense.
Bob
Science, like Nature, must also be tamed, with a view turned towards its preservation.