Micro-Volunteering

Article

Micro-volunteering is a concept pioneered by the organisation The Extraordinaries, which is developing a mobile phone application to match short, on-demand volunteer tasks, such as translating a sentence or identifying a bird in a photo, with charities that need them, letting people contribute in the small pockets of spare time they might otherwise spend playing games on their phone. Co-founder Jacob Colker credits the crowdsourcing ideas of writer Jeff Howe as an inspiration, and says the aim is to reach people wherever they have a few free minutes, whether on a mobile phone, a web widget, or whatever platform comes next, distinguishing the model from both virtual volunteering done at a computer and simple mobile giving by SMS donation.