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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."
Donating geek time to charity is something that I have been pondering for quite a while... 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?
This situation brought itself to bear a few years ago, when I learned that a friend of mine was donating not only his time, but also hard $$$ for server space for his favorite charity. What, if anything would he be able to write-off? He uses the server for other projects, so not 100% is for the charity.
Any accountant-geeks out there?
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WWJD? JWRTFM!
We have found that the various city, county, and private organizations are willing to bend over backwards to work with us. Bear in mind, I am not talking about a purely altruistic venture on my own firm's part, but rather a joint venture between a private company and the community, with profits being used to further develop technology-specific public works in the region.
People have already proven at least a passive willingness with distributed computing projects. The next obvious step is to donate a little non-profit coding. Plus, this works well as an adjunct to computer recycling programs that benefit "Third Worlds".
Voodoo Girl is the bomb!
While I appreciate your noble intentions, I'm not 100% sure how software development would help most 3rd world and developing nations. Unless, I've really been living under a rock, most of the people in such nations who would benefit from such are high up the power ladder and have little to no interest in distributing down the ladder.
Besides, wouldn't one have to focus on developing the infrstructure to run said software anyway. Last time I checked, running software needs computers. Computers need power, connectivity, and even sometimes access to this Internet thingy. If I wanted to lead a project to help developing nations, I'd be much more interested in building telecommunications and electrical infrastrucutre then writing software they probably can't run or use for much good yet anyway.
While your idea is noble, I think perhaps it is a little too soon to be really globaly useful?
My favorite odd todd line.
And the fact that I seriously considered volunteering, made me feel better
about not..volunteering.
Check it out... do something like these folks, except in your city.
only infrmatn esentil to understandn mst b tranmitd
...without leaving your neighborhood, let alone country.
Go to your local library or school or community college and offer to teach free courses or help with the IT infrastructure. Be a guru for some programmer-to-be!
I used to teach at an adult education centre which was free to students (though I did get paid, so I don't claim to be a humanitarian of unequal pedigree here). It was extremely rewarding and I learned a lot as well.
Robots are everywhere, and they eat old people's medicine for fuel.
I think that in general it would be better to localize charity activities. Not to say that someone in France shouldn't donate time and energy to someone in Finnland but I have serious questions on the validity of the UN's organizational units. We can argue the whole "Globalization" issues with this. I hear man organizations already doing charity work on donating CPUs with Linux and stuff to emerging worlds but honestly, who needs a PC if your starving to death. My personal feelings are in a world with limited resources we need to have priorities in charitable work:
1: Basic Needs (Food, Clothing, Shelter)
2: Self Sufficency (Ability to make\get you own Food, Clothing, and shelter. Watch the Movie Soilent Green, or read the book why this is imporant)
3: Advancement of Society Standard (Literacy, Freedom, Education)
4: Wants, Computers, Cars, Leather Jackets and Blue Jeans.
Emergine nations need to have a solid foundation and bridging the Digital Divide seems pretty damn low on the ilst of priorities if I am starving and have polluted water to drink. I think we can hold of on donating the limited dollars there are to charity and set more, I wouldn't say appropriate goal (I like the idea of briding the digital divide), but more pressing needs. It would be far better for the natives of these emergine nations to be able to afford buying a computer versus getting one for free. Even better yet to have an industry where they can make and compete in computer production.
I think that UNITES needs to focus more on developing industies, markets, and agricultural areas before worrying about poor people having email. The idea that they want to Bridge the Digital Divide seems oddly out of place when you apply it to nations that have people starving and dying of terrible diseases. There are limited charity dollars in the world and we need to take a hard look at where they go and how they are spent and I just don't see this as a project that needs the money. The Peace Corp. seems to be the best bang for the charitable dollar. I hope this post sparks some discussion on which charities do the most good with the dollars they get. Good luck to UNITES and friends.
-=[ Who Is John Galt? ]=-
I'm in my first year as a Tech Corps volunteer in Ohio. I basically donate two afternoons a month to a public school district in town to assist teachers with technology projects in the school. We'll be working on re-designing the high school's Web presence and we'll also be conducting a lesson with French students to make fictional travel Web sites of French travel desinations.
In my opinion, you can't beat the gratification that comes from doing something like this. I get the opportunity to lend my expertise to an inner-city school district that could greatly use it. Definitely a win-win. I can't encourage this enough.
-- jimmycarter
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.
I'm totally up for doing volunteer work, as long as it pays well.
come on fhqwhgads
Sounds like a concept similar to this.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
I love this idea but I am a little skeptical.
I've worked on enough volunteer projects to realize that most volunteers are people that have too much time on their hands. They've just moved to a new city, are between jobs, broke up with their significant other, etc. There is nothing wrong with this other than that all these situations are extremely temporary. As soon as the other parts of their lives start back up, the desire to volunteer disappears.
This a huge pain for the organization as they have devoted time and resources to orient and train these very short term volunteers.
Your proposal is even more likely to suffer from this as volunteers who never meet the people they are helping will feel even less obligation to the people them. You need to find some way to secure a time commitment from you volunteers and work very hard to make them feel connected to the work, otherwise the turnover will kill you.
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.
...we will come. Free Software is basically a "help your fellow man" kind of project, so it won't be very hard to find volunteers. However, as others have hinted, the real chore will be finding a task that can be solved by software that will benefit people without computers.
I've helped out with a few foodbanks have always been shocked at how incredibly primitive their distribution systems are. They have to have nearly prohibitive amounts of notice to get the orders for the right amounts of items correctly taken care of up-line. Locally there are no computers involved in this at all. A hand totaled list is read over the phone to a person who plugs it into a spreadsheet. AAAAAAAck! This is a job that screams, "Automate me." The people involved drool at the opportunity to place their orders less than a month in advance and to get rid of the paperwork, but setting up the infrastructure is most of the problem and actually writing the order submission app is pretty easy. In this case and so many others that I can imagine the majority of the work will be done on the scene. But for the fraction that doesn't have to to be done there, start some sourceforge projects and ask for volunteers. You'll find'em.
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.
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.