I definitely see this as part of a ‘pathway to volunteering’ to help people engage in more opportunities.

Perhaps it would be good to meet up for a coffee sometime and see who else is interested in exploring the idea a bit more?

As for ‘people in volunteering’ can I be a start? Have just spent last two years managing a volunteer centre.

Returning to just the idea of micro-volunteering it’s not hard to imagine this stretching to include other slightly longer levels of engagement – more than just 5-15 mins windows of opportunities. There is a movement in the US called One Brick and their primary role seems to be to maintain a volunteering opps calendar for various organisations. This allows volunteers to sign up casually as the orgs understand that they may only get 5 people for an event or they may get 20. Either way the org accepts the responsibility to be flexible.

I’ll stop talking now – but I would be very happy to hear directly from anyone interested in putting such a system together – just follow the link above.

The challenge is definitely in finding the right tasks. Tasks that can be done in 5 minute bursts – but that area meaningful enough to engage intelligent commuters, whilst being useful to non-profit organisations.

I had thought some sort of platform could be built on top of/along the lines of amazon mechanical turk, but I’m not sure what the mechanical turk type tasks would be… (looks like we’ve got a resource here in commuter cognitive surplus… but not sure what the demand for it might be?).

I was thinking on the London City trains that there might be some way of building virtual stock market style set ups which encourage those with financial know how to make micro-investment decisions which aggregate up in some way to something meaningful (I’ve heard also of information markets and prediction markets which might be useful here? But I don’t know all that much about them…)

Anyone know people in volunteering organisations who might be interested in exploring all of this a bit more?

I’m a big believer that volunteerism can achieve pretty much anything as long as the balance between trust & responsibility is right. The Ben Rigby (MobileVoter) project is interesting (the new book is even more so) but I’m not sure they quite have this balance right from what I’ve read online. The examples given often refer to professionals or specialists logging on via the mobile and essentially sharing their knowledge (knowledge volunteers?) as it applies to the need of a volunteer-engaging org. But I have trouble seeing how an organisation can ask for professional advice to be delivered so casually. What happens if they take the advice of a volunteer lawyer on a contract and it comes back to bite them? You can demonstrate due diligence by evidencing a track record or relationship between the host and volunteer. I’m betting that 5-15 minutes on a mobile won’t do that.

However, the crowdsourcing angle helps. What if you ask 10, 15 or 50 lawyers for their advice – given over the mobile during a spare moment – and then take their aggregate advice into consideration then maybe this might be a trustworthy process?

One you could even have fun thinking about a grassroots organisation that sought to have crowdsourced (ie democratic?) input on their major decision it took: what campaigns to pursue in the next year? should we accept money from this source? should we hire this or that role first? Decision could be presented in easy access mobile format. hmmmm?

How about offering an online space for aggregated campaign petitions & letters? campaigning organisations could supply a succinct overview of what/why they’re trying to achieve and allow people to find, read and, if they agree, click send/yes/no/whatever.

…just a thought.