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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."
I am so sick of these posts to Ask /. that can be answered by a Google search! Couldn't you come up with a query that would locate all the philanthropically minded hackers pining to make a contribution to the developing world on their home pages and Web logs? ;-)
Seriously: I'd be interested! Just like the Peace Corps without the tropical fevers!
Trouble making decisions? Just flip for it.
What would be more useful/worthwhile would be "lay the roads" or "build the bridges" drives that make it possible for all other kind of aid to reach those who need it.
There's a Mercedes gap too. I want one and can't afford one, but it's not government's job to do anything about it.
if I decide to write a piece of software for my favorite church, can I deduct the fair market value of that software on my taxes? Likewise, were people to contribute to an OpenChallenge project, would they be able to similary write-off the fair market value of that time?
Pardon me but why must there be a value placed on the time that one donates? Call me conservative or what ever but I think the whole beauty of Donating time to help 3rd world countries is just the humanity of doing it. I mean that is why they are 3rd/underdeveloped right, because they can't do it them selves?
How does it sound "I would love to help your country to be on par with the worlds supper power, but I can't write it off on my taxes, so stay poor."
Besides donating to a church should not be looked at as a tax write off. Isn't the whole Open Source about giving to the better of the community? So now we have people indirectly asking money before the produce any code?
This SIG pulled due to lack of funding. (This damn war is costing too much!)
I donated time to volunteer work at a then local high school - I have since moved - teaching students in project oriented programming competition formerly called the New Mexico Supercomputing Challenge (now called the Adventures in Supercomputing Challenge when they rolled it and the Sandia NL sponsored rival program together).
Students were brogutht ogether in small teams and taught programming, often from the ground up, math, and science towards a project. Often a lot of backfilling took place to get the students up to the point where they could understand the math and science behind the project as well as actually grasp what it would take to write code for the supercomputers. It was very challenging and a lot of fun.
It has always perplexed me when we have people so constantly complaining about the school system that those that have the time and energy to volunteer do not simply go down to their local school system and volunteer. Make an appointment with the principal and see where you can help. I betcha he or she will be very ecstatic if you can bring ideas and time to the table so long as it does not tax the school resource wise (budgets being tight things...)
The rewards of seeing a student's face light up when they get it are well worth the time...
Do you know why the road less traveled by is littered with the bones of the unwary?
The good thing about the knowlege industry is that not only can you telecommute. It's the fact that you can share the knowlege and be richer for it.
Beyond just giving them the source, you've got to make sure that you make every effort to make the recipients of your aid part of the team in the cathedral or at least feeling like they're part of the bazaar.
There's nothing worse than sending in aid that makes the person wind up with this big shiny thing that they don't have the resources to maintain or expand on.
So yeah. Clean water first. Food second. No war third. Good medicine, industrial infrastructure, a reliable democratic and open government... and then technology that the developing country can really feel that they own, rather than that they adopted because they found it or someone gave it to them.
It seems to me that while potentially useful, your idea of passing out sub-projects from software companies or IT teams in developing nations to a group of open source coders in the Western world doesn't really advance the goal of the UN initiative. As another poster mentioned, there are more serious problems to overcome in many developing nations that make "bridging the digital divide" realtively meaningless. I believe someone else pointed out that what these nations really need isn't code, but IT infrastructure.
Those are valid points, but I think the fundamental idea of the UN program is to provide technology experts who can not only assist in local projects, but also transfer their expertise through the course of working on those projects. A group of US/UK/GER/FRA/etc coders whipping out brilliant and useful code for sub-projects is certainly helpful, but it doesn't go very far in creating a communal working environment wherein the presumably more experienced techs volunteering can pass their knowledge and experience on to the local techs. Sure, the locals can read your brilliant source code, but they don't get to participate in the development of that code necessarily, and having their questions answered via email is nowhere near as positive a learning environment as working on the code with a real person next to them who can answer their questions and point out interesting tidbits on the fly.
The real digital divide is knowledge based, and the best way to close that gap is to teach someone how to do it themselves, not tell them to send the hard parts to someone else to do for them.
Of course that's just my opinion, and I'm probably wrong
*EXACTLY*. Any venture that claims to be of benefit to the "needy" should make sure that it provides the tools and education to empower the community in which they are working; otherwise, you end up with a community that is now *more reliant* on outside sources to work with the technology/software/whatever that you have provided.
I would liken giving a Zambian village a network of PCs without training them how to use and maintain them to teaching schoolchilren how to read a book, but without teaching them anything about semantics, grammar, etc... in other words, worthless.
How's the saying go?
:)
If you give people a fish, they eat for a day. If you teach people to fish, they eat for a lifetime.
If you teach a community how to use/manipulate technology, they become better equipped to get employment. So you've given them #2: Self Sufficiency. By getting jobs using the technology you've taught them, they can take care of #1: Basic Needs. Once they have work, they can worry less about #1 and start concentrating on things like educating their children and participating in the political process (#3). And one day, when they're good little consumers like the rest of us, they'll be able to waste their time keeping up with the Joneses (#4)
but has it ever occured to you that your properties of hard work and endurance which have given you the lifestyle that you enjoy wouldn't mean squat if your country dissolved into a bloody civil war?
You are the master of your own destiny for now, only because there are many people in your country who would die to preserve the free and open system which supports your market.
Take that away and life becomes a lottery. It won't matter if you are an elite business person or a crack guerilla sniper- in times of civil disorder people suffer, and suffer, and suffer no matter how hard they try. And I don't mean having to do something mildly degrading like sit around with objectionable people who are richer than you. I mean being so hungry that people can count your ribs and knowing that your high IQ can't turn stone into bread unless those people in the hills stop shooting long enough to plant a lousy vegetable patch. Even the people who are ostensibly in control of the whole war find themselves locked into the conflict and unable to see a way out that doesn't get them killed.
In afghanistan, there used to be kabul university (est 1932 by some french and turkish guys) complete with schools of medicine, pharmacy, economics etc... Then the taliban sent the country back to the stone age, with the exception of a pile of the imported tanks. What happened to all the educated, hard working people? they had crap lives and then died. Some of them wound up in other countries, where their hard work and life savings bought them a cell in a processing camp.
Anyway, bottom line: if you really feel bad about donating your time to help people like yourself except that they suddenly woke up one day to find out that terrorists had killed their government, just consider openchallenge as a competition instead. It says so on the website linked in the main article. Here's a list of winners and the cool stuff they won demonstrating how elite they were.
Wouldn't you like to have another feather in your cap? Another free GPS module to show off to your friends?
And if one day you were to find out that your country had dissolved into war or your economy had imploded into a gooey mess of corruption, wouldn't you be comforted by the hope that somewhere out there there might be smart, talented people who care about other human beings in real dire straits and for whatever reason use their powers and skills to help.