The Extraordinaries! A new ‘micro-volunteering’ service that aims to crowdsource positive collective action in service of worthy causes. Check it!

Many of us have difficulty finding spare time to volunteer, even for causes and organizations that we’re really passionate about. Life keeps us busy, and the blocks of time required to get to and from volunteer opportunities, and spend meaningful amounts of time that actually accomplish something while there, are far and few between.

But what if those small snippets of down time that clutter the transitions and margins of our day – those moments between meetings, spent waiting for or sitting on the bus, or wondering if a late friend or babysitter will ever show up- could be turned into productive resources for service, giving back and solving problems that benefit the causes you care about.

A new organization called The Extraordinaries, currently in beta, appears to be the first to have truly discovered the fertile potential of these lost moments in the “open source” age of pervasive network technology, smart phones and cheap digital cameras. The organization allows for a new type of action, dubbed “micro-volunteering”, which allows individuals to enlist their brains and energies for short bursts of participation in order to complete small tasks for causes that can add up to enormous benefits when enough people participate. The tasks can be completed in front of a computer with an internet connection or with an iPhone, and people can participate for any period of time that their schedule can fit.

Sample tasks that can be completed through the site currently include translating documents or pieces of documents into other languages; image tagging for museums and cultural institutions; investigation, evidence collection and citizen journalism; community mapping; copy editing; and feedback and program criticism. (Note: the site is currently in beta mode and the tasks available to web users are limited to image tagging; however, iPhone users can participate in all the other tasks. The website states that all tasks will be available to web users soon.)

The site makes clear just how far and how rapidly the phenomenon of “crowdsourcing” is starting to extend. Crowdsourcing describes forms of web-enabled collaboration, production and business that involve the collection of a multitude of contributions from numerous volunteer or independent sources, which are usually sorted and selected based on group rating if a single outcome is what’s needed, or gradually augmented overtime by countless tweaks and contributions of various sizes by sometimes thousands of dispersed contributors. Since crowdsourcing is really only possible on the scale that it occurs today because of the internet, it’s not surprising that early projects involved software and operating system creation. But today, crowdsourcing is driving an unprecedented amount of production in a growing range of fields.

The Extraordinaries aims to crowdsource service for great causes from the small, forgotten moments of the day from thousands of participants. While new and still working out bugs, the site just may represent a truly game changing moment in the history of volunteerism and collective action by aggregating the tiny, incremental heroics of distributed volunteers. Give the site a look and stay tuned for future developments. One of these days you just might be able to help Solar One out on there . . .


Posted on Thursday, September 17th, 2009 at 1:31 pm | Tagged in Solar One | posted by Neidl

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