The Virtual Volunteering Wiki was developed in association with The Last Virtual Volunteering Guidebook, available as a print book and an electronic book.

Also see this page of  news feeds that automatically link to the latest web pages, blogs, and other online materials that use terms that relate to virtual volunteering (this is automatically-generated content; we do not control what shows up on these RSS feeds or what online materials get linked).

If a link below is broken, please type it into archive.org to retrieve an archived version of the article.

Note that these are articles, as opposed to research and academic papers, which can be found here.

Articles (in reverse date order):

20 December 2018: According to this article from the United Nations Volunteers program, which administers the UN's Online Volunteering service, "The number of UN Online Volunteers has indeed increased from 11,000 in 2015 to almost 18,000 in 2017, with the number of assignments increasing to 23,000." The term "UN Online Volunteers" is the term UNV uses to describe the number of people who have signed up for online volunteering assignments via the OV service. 

19 November 2018: The Library of Congress Announces By the People (crowd.loc.gov) at its first transcribe-a-thon and on the 155th anniversary of Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. The phrase comes from the closing line of that speech, which states “It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us… that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth." Via the By the People initiative, online volunteers transcribe, review and tag digitized images of manuscripts and typed materials from the Library’s collections. These transcriptions improve search, readability and access to handwritten and typed documents for those who are not fully sighted or cannot read the handwriting of the original documents. The site also offers a free guide (PDF) on How to host a transcribe-a-thon (PDF).

18 October 2018: School-based online volunteering/literacy program launches in Georgia: The company Innovations for Learning (IFL) is partnering with the Newton County, Georgia School System to launch TutorMate, an online reading program, to local first-grade classrooms. This virtual volunteering program is meant to help "thousands of students learn to read." According to the press release, more than 200 corporations and organizations partner with IFL to recruit online volunteers to help young students learn to read.

4 September 2018: Crowdsourcing / Hive Mind – it’s been happening since at least 1849! Crowdsourcing is an open, public call for contributions from anyone to talk about a pressing issue, offer advice or data or to help solve a problem or challenge. It’s an open-call brainstorming session. While the term crowdsourcing was popularized online to describe Internet-based activities, there are examples of projects that, in retrospect, can also be described as crowdsourcing, without the Internet. Online crowdsourcing is one example of virtual volunteering, and this blog helps link it to initiatives that are more than 100 years old.

August 2018 From summer 2013 through part of 2018, the Forest Watchers project was a combination of volunteer computing and "volunteer thinking." The term volunteer computing here means distributed computing, in which computer owners donate their computer's computing resources to a project, which remotely controls their computers when the owner isn't using it in order to use the computer to process large amounts of data. The Forest Watchers project also used crowdsourcing, where satallite images were classified into forest or non-forest by online volunteers. "This citizen science project aims at making possible to anyone (locals, volunteers, NGOs, governments, etc), anywhere in the world, to monitor selected patches of forest across the globe, almost in real-time, using a notebook, a tablet or a smart phone connected to the Internet." Forest Watchers used data from the UN Operational Satellite Applications Programme (UNOSAT), which provides satellite imagery analysis and capacity development to the UN system, UN member states, and its partners. The project also used the free and open source framework PyBossa which is released under the GNU Affero general public license version 3.0. The UN lead agency was the United Nations Institute for Training and Research (UNITR) and partners included the Open SOciety Foundations, Citizen Cyberscience Centre and the University of São Paulo (UNIFESP). To see the original Forest Watchers web site, go to archive.org / the Internet Archive and paste this URL into the search: http://forestwatchers.net

12 July 2018: The Indiana State Archives began seeking online volunteers in July 2018 to help commemorate the centennial of World War I by transcribing and indexing its collection of service record cards. These cards detail the military service of Hoosier veterans who served during World War I. The Indiana World War I Service Record Cards project is still happening. To see the original WBIW article and call for online volunteers, go to archive.org / the Internet Wayback Machine and cut and paste this URL:
http://www.wbiw.com/state/archive/2018/07/become-a-virtual-volunteer-and-help-index-ww1-service-record-cards.php

4 July 2018: Platform to match volunteer skills to cybercrime investigations. A secure collaborative platform to help Northamptonshire (England, U.K.) police officers tap into the expertise of the county’s highly-skilled cyber volunteers has been developed. The platform will match the skills and capacity of the county’s cyber security volunteers with the needs of specific police investigations. Northamptonshire’s 50 volunteers are highly skilled professionals with considerable expertise, particularly focused on business cyber security. They give their time to allow police to tap into their expertise that would otherwise need to be purchased from specialist agencies, and they can support police in the acquisition of evidence that could be useful in criminal investigations. If it proves to be successful, the platform has the potential to be rolled out across the East Midlands region and offered to police forces across the country to manage their own cyber volunteers.

25 June 2018 Online volunteers help children & families separated by US Government / ICE at border. An excellent example of virtual volunteering as digital activism: how librarians and other humanities academics and geeks banded together to figure out where the government had sent immigrant children snatched from their parents at the border, to help their parents find them again. Excerpts from this Wired article: Alex Gil was IMing with his colleague Manan Ahmed when they decided they had to do something about children being separated from their parents at the US-Mexico border... Gil, a father of two, knew they could be useful. As the digital scholarship librarian at Columbia University, Gil's job is to use technology to help people find information—skills he had put to use in times of crisis before. Gil and Ahmed, a historian at Columbia, assembled a team of what Gil calls “digital ninjas” for a “crisis researchathon.” These volunteers were professors, graduate students, researchers, and fellows from across the country with varied academic focus, but they all had two things in common: an interest in the history of colonialism, empire, and borders; and the belief that classical research methods can be used not just to understand the past but to reveal the present.

15 May 2018 The Papers of the War Department Project has gone on hiatus. The five-year project, based at George Mason University, has mobilized hundreds of online volunteers to transcribe more than 45,000 documents and hundreds of thousands of individual pages. Transcription volunteers have encountered vast differences in handwriting, and the archive contains many different kinds of documents in addition to traditional correspondence, such as accountant records, Indian treaties, inventories of equipment, and draft notes. The project is funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Historical Publications and Records Commission. "We appreciate your transcription efforts and look forward to unveiling a more user-friendly transcription process in a few months’ time!"

1 May 2018 Rothco Delivers Micro Volunteering Platform for Dairygold  Rothco, now part of Accenture Interactive, has created a new omni-channel campaign that taps into the growing micro-volunteering (MV) for its client Dairygold. The campaign is the next iteration of Dairygold’s ‘Make a Minute for the Good Stuff’ campaign and aims to get the Irish public to contribute to good causes around their busy day-to-day lives. As part of the campaign, Rothco created a platform for Dairygold that allows a team of volunteers complete small tasks that make up a larger project. As a form of virtual volunteering, the tasks are usually distributed and completed online via an internet-connected device, including smartphones. Dairygold has partnered with six charitable organisations for the campaign including: Be My Eyes, The Cheetah Conservation Fund, Count Flowers for Bees, Meitheal Duchas.ie, Crowdcrafting and Post Pals. They invite people to choose a cause they feel passionate about and complete a simple task, then spread the word about MV. The Irish public can contribute via smartphone app or at their Make a Minute web site.

21 April 2018, Jerseyville, Illinois: Alice McGowen, a digital volunteer from Jerseyville, IL has received the Illinois Governor's Volunteer Service award. She is the Team Leader of the Vulnerable Population/Service Dog Team for Humanity Road, www.humanityroad.org, an award winning US-based nonprofit. At Humanity Road, she established the Disability, Accessibility and Functional needs social media awareness program and launched a new hashtag, #DAFN, to track information for vulnerable population. She also compiled and shared Illinois state and county vulnerable population registries and promotes them in social media. She is trained in CDC Crisis and Emergency Risk Communications (CERC), ADA Accessible Assembly Areas and is also the recipient of the Presidential Lifetime Achievement Award from President Obama. Alice has been disabled for 21 years and does most of her volunteering remotely from home on her computer. "Technology and Computers were not her primary skillset... Alice spent many hours studying and attending online courses to improve her skills." 

13 April 2018 Online volunteers are fighting fake reviews, ghost listings and other scams on Google Maps. Why isn't Google responding? Google Maps and Google's other mapping app, Waze, have features that allow businesses to advertise based on their locations and allows customers to post reviews. But the service is plagued by fake reviews, ghost listings, lead generation schemes and impersonators. People use fake reviews to prop up their legitimate business, sabotage a competitor with bad reviews, or make an illegitimate listing look like it really exists — either to drive phone calls to their real business or to generate customer leads, which they will then sell. This hurts both honest business owners and people who have come to rely on Google Maps to find information they need. In the last year, Google has come under fire for how much it has relied on outsiders - online volunteers - to help it find fake news in search, incorrect responses through its Home smart speaker and inappropriate videos in the trending section on YouTube. This army of self-organized online volunteers are passionate "Top Contributors who spend countless unpaid hours answering questions and reporting spam. "I'm one of those stupid guys who volunteers a lot of my time to give Google free labor," Mike Blumenthal laughs. Hidden under the humor is a very real frustration: He thinks it's ridiculous that volunteers like him are doing dirty work that Google's engineers should be able to handle.

4 April 2018: The Freedom on the Move (FOTM) public database project at Cornell University is a major digital database effort to bring together North American fugitive slave advertisements in newspapers from regional, state, and other collections. “Ironically, in trying to retrieve their property — the people they claimed as things — enslavers left us mounds of evidence about the humanity of the people they bought and sold,” said Dr. Mary Niall Mitchell, professor of early American history at the University of New Orleans and one of the three lead historians on FOTM. Online volunteers will be invited to add data tags to the screened entries and to transcribe the ads. FOTM received funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) digital humanities grants. Here is an excellent article on about the database, from which Dr. Mitchell's quote is taken. Wiki editor note: It's such a shame organizers aren't calling this a virtual volunteering initiative nor talking about volunteers - which is what they mean when they say crowdsourcing. By not using that word, it makes it really hard to find! #history

20 February 2018 Language barriers limit the ability of refugees and immigrants to seek help, and aid workers to provide it. Tarjimly is a new service that connects multi-lingual online volunteers who speak both the language of the refugee or immigrant with a person trying to help. The idea isn’t to guide people through major processes like immigration — dedicated interpreters are still needed for such — but to handle time-sensitive matters like distribution of food and water or explaining an event or injury. Tarjimly is on Facebook Messenger only, but an independent, multi-platform app is on the way that will allow cross-platform chats, between Messenger or WhatsApp and SMS, for instance. Using the chat interface, an aid provider or refugee indicates their own language and the language of the person with whom they need to speak. Tarjimly scours its database of volunteers and, using a bit of machine learning, it finds the users most likely to respond quickly. When it finds one, it connects the two through the chat interface; to make things easy and anonymous, the messages are relayed through Tarjimly’s servers, which both obscure the users’ IDs and allow cross-platform chats. Once connected, the user can enter text or send voice messages; the volunteer just translates them and sends them back for the user to share with their interlocutor how they please. More at TechCrunch

20 January 2018 United Way of the Greater Clarksville Region and the Clarksville-Montgomery County School System in Tennessee is launching  READ UNITED, a program designed to enhance early literacy for local elementary school students by creating opportunities for online volunteers to read with students virtually over video software. For thirty minutes each week, volunteers and students will read back and forth to each other using video conferencing technology. “We hear from many in our community who want to lend their time and talents to make a difference, but are challenged by time and location constraints. The program takes away those barriers while providing a unique learning opportunity to students.” - Ginna Holleman, local United Way CEO. The Last Virtual Volunteering Guidebook has details on how to set up such an online mentoring/tutoring program, including guidelines on screening and training online volunteers, ensuring safety, supporting volunteers, etc. The Guidebook is available for purchase as a paperback and an ebook.

Note that these are articles, as opposed to research and academic papers, which can be found here.