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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?"
How about this one? Frankly I know not much about them, but according to their unsolicited letters sent to all small and medium companies, they claims to be a non-profit organization which offers free audit for companies computer systems. They even request everybody assist in the auditing. How nice they are.
(For humor-impaired, this is a joke)
Netaid.org
Pearls of Africa is run entirely by online volunteers who research and develop programs, solicit donations, and run a children's resource library in Uganda geared toward disabilities. Moy traveled to Uganda in November 2001 with the United Nations to open the library.
World Computer Exchange , based in Massachusetts, relies on virtual volunteers in its mission to bring computers to schools in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Since it was founded in October 1999, the organization has helped 676 schools and almost 256,000 students go online, says Tim Anderson, president and founder.
VolunteerMatch , which links volunteers with more than 23,000 organizations offering about 40,000 volunteer opportunities, is helping that cause, says Jason Willett, director of communications. Since 1998, nearly one million people signed up for an opportunity through VolunteerMatch.
As well, there are online mentors like NetMentors , which offers online career development for teenagers. It serves as a virtual career counselor with expertise on 70 different careers. With about 800 mentors, the group has counseled 1000 students entirely through its Web site.
Don't think that a small group of dedicated individuals can't change the world. it's the only thing that ever has.
Some minor military healthcare data on it, but I can erase that.
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
If I virtually volunteer, do I only have to do virtual work? If so, sign me up!
"...a global nonprofit organization committed to helping the world's poorest youth bridge the disturbing global divides in information, technology and understanding."
How about a global nonprofit organization committed to helping the world's poorest youth eat and avoid dying from preventable diseases?
Ok. I agree with educating the underpriviledged simply because through better education, the resources of this planet can be harnessed for the greater good, eliminating poverty and ridiculous infant mortality rates.
I even agree with skipping the industrial revolution, or at least speeding through it for the sake of protecting our environment.
If all of these underpriviledged starving people start living out full lives and competing in our job market, a lot of people are going to get _really_ freaked out. It'll be the perfect breeding grounds for terrorist acitivities. Budding intellectuals can coordinate covert ops on the lazy fat established classes in a high tech wargame which really just replaces the chaos that is neatly tucked away in starving countries.
So instead of seeing a shrivelled up, dying child, expect an empowered generation emerge from the third world. They just might show us a thing or two, and they'll definitely give us a run for our money.
Amazing. All that from a donated TRS-80.
Has anyone thought this through? Won't the third-world children who educate themselves on our used PCs grow up to compete in the labor market with good old American techies and engineers?
These commies and subversives are undermining the US economy! They are fostering a pool of cheap technical labour that will suck thousands of jobs across the border, to IT sweatshops where children as young as 12 pound out third-rate code for $1.75 a day! On our own PCs, no less... the irony!
Our very livelihoods are at stake and I, for one, will not stand for this terrorist plot. Do the patriotic thing and let your computers erode in landfills where they belong! (Just make sure you don't drink nearby well water for 30 years)
It's called "Open Source", a few of you may have heard of it.
There's a big group that controls a bunch of it called GNU -- they're wacky and pronounce the 'g' in GNU.
There's even a open source kernel called "Linux" started by some European guy. He works for some other company that does processors but spends a lot of time on the Linux thing.
Anyways, just wanted to point some folks at some other volunteer possibilities..
Volunteer Match and NetworkForGood list in person volunteer opportunities online. But most opportunities to actually volunteer online are around mentoring.
The UN has an online volunteering (see:http://www.unv.org/volunteers/options/online/ index.htm. Their online volunteering specialist, Jayne Cravens (homepage www.coyotecommunications.org, has been vocal about the benefits of online volunteering for years (real years, not internet years).
There are also opportunities at Mentoring.org (a site devoted to mentoring youth), and MicroMentor a pilot project devoted to mentoring micro entrepreneurs.
...my virtual public spirit and enthusiasm couldn't overcome my real-world apathy and laziness.
God, sometimes it gets so bad that I can't even be bothered to finish my own
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
>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
Forgot to provide the link: http://volunteersearch.gov.au
cryptorights
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Thanks to Slashdot posters for having shown me these links in past discussions! :)
Maybe I can find a girl to volunteer to be my girlfriend. Mostlikely not. :(
Free Instant Site Inclusion
Another worthy organisation along the same lines as mentioned in the article is ComputerBank Australia.
They take old hardware, repair/refurbish it, install Debian on it and distribute it to the needy. A better description is availble on their website (linked above).
David de Groot Snr Systems Engineer
I agree fully, the world does not have the resources to bring everyone up to the standard Europeans and Americans are used to, as well as some Asian countrys. Not just education but living standards, imagine trying to give every china man, indian, african, a house (not some shack, im talking a proper house), couple of cars, and also jobs that are well paid for every single one of them, and the resources needed for that?? Hey I admit im generalising a bit, not every person in these countrys are poor/unfed/eneducated etc, but the vast vast majority are. Utopia will never happen, not while things are finite and energy costs money.
Laptop Reviews
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.
Why did the folks at Volunteermatch make the site US only? Did they figure other countries might not need a similar facility?
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.
Education alone doesn't work though. There has been a lot of pressure from the IMF/WB and foreign aid donors to establish schooling in sub-Saharan Africa. As a result, there is a lot more schooling in Africa than there was 50 years ago, and a ton of Unviersities.
But...in many countries in Africa, there is no functioning free market economy to hire the newly educated. So often children drop out of school to work in the fields and make some money, or stay in school and come to the US and Europe once they have a college degree.
It is no suprise that 50 years of the West trying to get economic growth going in Africa has failed. The West has always missed the basics, free markets that are appropriately regulated, with strong currencies (that are really strong and not artifically propped up by exchange laws that encourage black-market currency trading) are what allows economic growth to occur.
In the meantime, we've been trying to get Africa to industrialize and educate. Industrial machinery has no inputs or way to sell outputs in the government-commanded economies. Oops. Education also failed for the reasons I mentioned above. Ooops. So then we just started to give them loans (bribes) to fix their economies. Didn't work because the people in charge kept the loans (bribes), didn't change, and now have Bono shilling for them to get debt forgiveness to get more loans (bribes).
If US geeks were more economically literate, that might help!
The Alameda County Computer Resource Center in Oakland doesn't just recycle old computers (and none of that China dumping shit either), but provides hardware to many organizations and individuals who otherwise would go without.
If you're local, they're definitely worth your time, your old hardware, and your money.
Even Jesus hates listening to Creed.
There is another one called Charity Focus, Inc (www.charityfocus.org, which I'm a member of) and is based out of California. They hook up volunteers in web/graphics design, project management and project leadership with NPO's in need of web sites (or web designers to re-do old sites). Through them I rebuilt (with the help of a volunteer for whom I took over after she had to leave the project due to medical reasons) the website for PeopleTech.org,an NPO that takes donated computers, refurbishes them, and donates them to needy children/families (more info on their site).
"There is a way that seems right to a man, but its end is the way of death." Proverbs 16:25 (NKJV)
If US geeks were more economically literate, that might help!
/me is overjoyed.
I find it utterly ironic that in the united states, the culmination of high school economics is playing monopoly with "pretend checks" instead of "pretend money."
I only took that shit because auto mechanics 2(best course set in my school aside from AP Physics) was full. I got in next semster!
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
If the entire world was as developed as the West, I am sure they would find the energy needed. It would be a great boon to society to have starving Ethiopian farmers become well-fed Ph.D. engineers working on hydrogen, fusion, and solar energy!
CO2 is an issue. It is an economic "externality" that can only be effectively dealt with through regulation.
But the decision is whether you develop technology for economically reasonable CO2 reduction now and regulate later, or whether you regulate now (potentially disrupting global economies) in hope of developing technology later, if you can afford it.
The US government decided to look for technology first before adopting the Kyoto Protocol, which would provide a questionable envrionmental benefit even if it could be enforced.
Either way, the good news is that CO2 reducing technologies are under development (mainly in high-GDP countries). We already have nuclear fission which we may need global climate change to give us the guts to use. LED lighting, fuel cells, advanced solar, and hydrogen fuel are currently under development.
One other thought: The US produces the most CO2 per capita, but the least CO2 per dollar of GDP in the world. Thinking that way, it is the most efficient user of energy...