Slashdot Mirror
Virtual Volunteering
An anonymous reader writes "Virtual Volunteering is new to me, so I thought that I would pass the info. along. Given the downturn in employment and the need to keep an active resume or CV, becoming a 'Virtual Volunteer', may be just the way to refresh your outlook and your resume. A PC World article talks about two sites which list numerous opportunities; Volunteer Match lists 41,538 opportunities associated with 23,359 organizations, and World Computer Exchange which 'is a global nonprofit organization committed to helping the world's poorest youth bridge the disturbing global divides in information, technology and understanding. WCE does this by keeping donated PCs, Macs, and Laptops out of landfills and giving them new life connecting youth to the Internet in Africa, Asia, and Latin America.' There are most likely more organizations like this out there, anybody have a special one that they are associated with?"
>I suspect you are missing the point of volunteerism.
I think what he's asking is perfectly reasonable. If nobody tends to his basic needs, he either has to:
1) Starve and rot
2) Get a job, siphoning off 40 or more hours each week.
Both put a substantial crimp in his ability to devote effort to the cause.
I admit the system he proposes is less than the pure model of volunteering, but it's a tradeoff. The sponsor will hand out some money and/or supplies to keep him fed, and he will be able to supply much more labour to the sponsor than he otherwise would be able to.
It's just like a fascist dictatorship, without the punctual rail service!
Having worked for a software company which didn't ship anything in three years, I was feeling like I was wasting a lot of time, as well as not giving anything back to my adoptive home (Seattle).
:) What I am saying is that you should find a volunteer opportunity that works for you, in the real world (not virtually) and give it a go. While you're doing good for others, it's ultimately great because it's good for you!
I looked into a number of volunteering places. The post is true that it's "virtual volunteering" when you use those matchmaking sites, but there's nothing virtual when it comes to actually doing the hands-on volunteer work.
I found YTP Seattle which had special positions for IT specialists. In the end, I didn't get one of those positions because they didn't need any at the time, but I have happily given two hours of my week for the last nine months to some very deserving students from challenging backgrounds.
It's easy to say that these two hours feel like the most usefully-spent of each week.
Don't inundate YTP in particular, I'm sure they don't want to be slashdotted
Trying to deliver food to starving people in the third world is mostly
a losing proposition -- not because we don't have food to spare, and
not because they don't need food, but for more practical reasons that
vary somewhat from area to area but start to look depressingly similar
after a while. Mostly it has to do with what Bill Cosby calls "Brain
Dammage".
The US government tried it in Somolia not very many years ago.
Almost none of the food got to actual starving people; local thugs
confiscated it so they could feed the armies they were using to
oppress the people. (This was entirely predictable, for people
who understand the third world.) We ended up getting involved
militarily (yeah, more US forces in the third world, that sure
makes us popular in the UN), but that didn't work so well either,
and the instant our forces pulled out everything went back like
it was. This was during the Clinton administration, and it was
well-intentioned, but it just plain didn't work.
The US government isn't the only entity to ever try it, not by a
long shot. Any number of church denominations have tried to set
up an infrastructure for taking food to starving people; these
experiments have all failed, and not for lack of food to take over.
GBIM (a missions organisation) concluded decades ago that providing
education is okay, but providing physical goods brings out the
worst in the people they are trying to help. They now have a
standing policy against giving people physical stuff that is out
of proportion to what they could get on their own. So they build
church buildings out of local materiels now, instead of importing
a nice one, and they don't hand out a lot of stuff. The reason
providing education works better? Nobody's sure _exactly_. It's
not because the people need it more than they need food and stuff;
they need both. Mostly it's because starving people don't _fight_
over education. The really interesting thing is, it's something
they want almost as much as they want food (in some places), but
they behave differently to acquire it. The theory is that you can't
steal or horde education because it takes too long to acquire, but
others say it's because it isn't lost when shared. Whatever, it
works: people behave more decently when you give them information
than when you try to give them food.
Now, I'm not sure where computers would fall in. It's worth trying
to see, but there's a distinct possibility they're going to fall
into the same category with food, and that giving them out is going
to prove to be impracticable. Of course, if that turns out to be the
case you could retain the computers at the organisation and use them
to provide training or whatnot.
If you want to avoid helping Microsoft, just make sure you train
them on OSS.
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
The concept that the world cannot support a population living with "Western" standards is not only wrong, it is pseudo-racist.
As societies become more technologically and economically developed, resources are used more efficiently. Moreover, advanced economies can afford to search more far, wide, and smart with regard to resources. In the US, most commodities are cheaper now (in inflation adjusted terms) than 30 years ago. Richer countries also have decreased birth rates.
Moreover, "externalities" such as air pollution are easier to deal with in a rich economy because the extra money is there to add the exhaust controls and regulations neeeded. If you are going to starve, you don't care about micro-particles breathed in because of your in-home coal fire.
The big mistake is that economies are not zero-sum games. Everyone can get rich together, infact the world is far, far richer now than it was than at the turn of the century. Look at places like South Korea that went from a dirt-poor agricultural country to having better broadband than the US. Even very underdeveloped countries are better off, though lagging Western standards.
Every free market exchange raises the wealth of both parties, or else the parties would not agree to participate. Moreover, rises in market prices of resources (if they happen) either cause more effort to go into finding them, or cause more effort to go into alternatives.
This doesn't mean there won't be some specific environmental problems...global CO2 is probably a problem, but would be easier to deal with in a rich world than a poor one. But don't worry about non-externality commodities such as iron, tin, copper, and oil, the market will take care of them just fine.