Can you do Canthat you do that online? online? Micro-volunteering and crowd-sourcing by Darko Buldioski New tools demand new terms that describe them and help them improve it even further. They are
[email protected] more precisely. The hot terms, although as activities spared paperwork and bureaucratic procedures they not very new, are micro-volunteering and and can focus on the work instead. crowd-sourcing. These are assignments that do not In the era of social media the networks of non-profits take long to complete; do not involve high security Be aware of slacktivism and volunteers can do a lot more than in the past. or handling of proprietary data; do not require ‘A social network is not necessarily bound by rela- much supervision; are important, as all volunteering tionships as much as it is driven by the exchange of Social networks have existed as long as humans – in Wellman points out a small fact of contempo- activities should be, but not immediately critical shared ideas and information through a one-to-one fact, the ability to socialise is a large part, maybe the rary life: making a telephone call in the wired age and can be done by just one person, rather than and one-to-many conversation that is inclusive of most important part, of what distinguishes Homo meant making a connection with a place, but ma- needing an organised team. top-down, bottom-up, inside-out, and outside-in sapiens from other primates. Since the telegraph king a phone call in the wireless age means ma- peer-to-peer interaction.’ (Solis, 2009) But put- began to wire the world, and the telephone and the king a connection with a person.