The Virtual Volunteering Wiki was developed in association with The Last Virtual Volunteering Guidebook, a book that was published in 2014.

This page tracks news about virtual volunteering before 2013. The earliest media story regarding involving online volunteers that we can find is from 1996. There may be earlier articles, but the term virtual volunteering wouldn't have been used.

You can also view this curated list of the most recent news regarding virtual volunteering.

Or see this this page of automatically-generated news links 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If a link is broken, please type it into archive.org to retrieve an archived version of the article.

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

28 December 2014, Kuala Lumpur: At a special training, more than a hundred Malaysian youth learned about how NGOs operate and volunteerism, including “digital volunteering” (virtual volunteering), and about how to use ngohub.asia, a web site that brings together NGOs, volunteers and donors in/for Malaysia. Unfortunately, the person quoted in this article seems to believe that virtual volunteering doesn’t require “time, effort and skills” - that’s one thing we know that, for sure, it does, just like ANY volunteering!

27 December 2014, Wisconsin and Michigan: In Alphaville, a virtual town used for cyber security training, the banks are robbed on a regular basis, the power plant and water system are under constant siege, and wireless networks at coffee shops are crawling with spyware meant to steal your personal information. The computer system at City Hall has been hijacked and the elementary school's system is infected with malware that could have disastrous consequences. Alphaville is part of the Michigan Cyber Range, which teaches computer network professionals to detect, prevent and mitigate cyber attacks in real-world settings. By plugging a laptop into a portal at a special hub, IT professionals can enter Alphaville to test their skills against hackers, who are in reality Merit Network staff or online volunteers from colleges. The cyber range also can be accessed from Wisconsin through a butt — large groups of remote, networked computers — managed by Merit Network. The Merit Network wants to establish three cyber "volunteer fire departments" in Wisconsin that would respond to major attacks and assist police in investigating the attacks. Online volunteers would be recruited from industry, academia, state and local governments.

18 December 2014, Warsaw, Poland: winners of the third edition of the Discover E-volunteering Competition have been announced . They are from Armenia, Croatia, Poland and Spain. The competition is organized by E-wolontariat , an NGO in Poland and a leader in the promotion of virtual volunteering. The organization has also launched a free guide to virtual volunteering.

1 December 2014, Virtual volunteering grows in Australia . "It overcomes the tyranny of distance we have in Australia."

November - December 2014, Bonn, Germany: the United Nations' Online Volunteering service, managed by staff at UN Volunteers HQ in Germany, has released some of the best examples of virtual volunteering that happened as a result of their service in 2014. The examples are from each of UNV’s five priority areas: securing access to basic social services, community resilience for environment and disaster risk reduction, peace-building, youth, and national capacity development through volunteer schemes.

21 Nov. 2014 and 19 Nov. 2014, Social media’s role in emergencies tested, an article in The Chronicle Herald, and US, Canada Team Up For Joint Response To Disaster Striking Both Nations, an article in Homeland Security Today (HSToday), about the Social media, digital volunteers in emergency management: Digital Volunteer-Supported Recovery Operation Experiment . Several countries have now formed Virtual Operations Support Teams (VOSTs). These local organizations perform a variety of digital support services such as monitoring, filtering, and mapping of relevant information. Since 2013, the Canadian Safety and Security Program (CSSP) has supported a number of projects and activities to explore the role of social media for emergency management, including the Digital Volunteer-Supported Recovery Operations Experiment, one of the activities under the Canada-U.S Enhanced Resiliency Experiment, known as CAUSE III.

10 Nov. 2014, Ingrid Cruz: Virtual Volunteer. A profile of an online volunteer who provides English-to-Spanish translation for several organizations, including The Museum of Northwest Art in Washington State. "Translating is the only volunteer work I do remotely. Being an avid reader myself, I really enjoy it, because my knowledge of programs and places has really broadened my perspective. I get to travel and connect with people, even though it not face to face, but it is substantial material. I am more aware of things happening outside of my “circle.” I acquire new vocabulary, learn nuances of the both languages (English-Spanish) and learn a little about everything from art, cooking, farming, theater, education, health and preventive care, law, civics and more.

1 Nov. 2014, Long Beach, New York, USA. The Virtual Senior Center for Nassau County homebound seniors was officially launched at the Manhasset Unitarian Universalist Congregation, designed to keep homebound seniors connected to their peers and centers via VSC-enabled computers and assistive technology. The Magnolia Senior Center is recruiting volunteers willing to facilitate an interactive 45-60 minute class to engage homebound seniors in meaningful ways . Volunteers can lead a class on a topic that you are passionate about: Music and Art appreciation, Social Sciences, History, Health/Wellness, News and Politics, Exercise, Computer training, Language Arts, Interactive Games, Storytelling, can be discussion-based, an activity (like a chair exercise class) or performance-based (singing/musical instrument) with some discussion. More information on the “Virtual Senior Center”: www.selfhelp.net/virtual-senior-center

8 Oct. 2014, Queensland, Australia. New York helps sort Queensland's digital history. Volunteers from across the country and overseas are helping to organise Queensland's digital history through a new community project. The State Library of Queensland is getting members of the public to help make its digital photos, newspaper articles and diaries more accessible online as part of the Pitch In! program. Volunteers are set tasks such as adding information to photos and transcribing newspaper articles that make up the library's online digital collection. Margaret Warren is the co-ordinator of discovery services and says people are involved from as far as New York and Ireland. "We have a digital volunteer in New York. She is one of our best taggers of Flickr photos, so she really likes the photographs and is really invested in helping us. We also have a volunteer in Ireland, so you can be as far afield as you like and still contribute."

1 Oct. 2014 Taking It Digital: New Opportunities for Volunteer Service has been published by Junior Achievement and the Citi Foundation, and reports on JA's Digital Volunteer Strategy Initiative in the USA, which develops online educational assets and digital delivery tools for JA’s high school JA Personal Finance® course. "This report is based on the best practice literature in online volunteering, volunteer management, and online education; a review of a beta set of online project tools; and interviews with JA volunteer managers involved in a recent pilot of the Initiative (Phase II of a two-phase pilot project). The study purpose is to identify issues organizations should consider in taking their volunteer/service programs into the digital realm." In the JA's program, volunteers teach a five-unit course to students in diverse school settings using both on-site and off-site components: after an initial face-to-face visit to the classroom to introduce the course, the volunteer remotely leads several sessions of online lessons, which requires onsite facilitation by the classroom teacher.

3, Sept. 2014 London. Micro-volunteering: the next big craze in giving? "Fcancer is a new platform leveraging the trend of online social giving and attracting a community of volunteers who are pledging their skills to various cancer charities... The concept sees you volunteer your time in bite-sized chunks, from your own home and on your own terms, paving the way for another new way to give. Essentially a social media platform, volunteers across the world create an online profile on the website, select the skill they want to donate and match with the cancer charity they want to donate time to... With the digital revolution extending its grip on the charity sector, the choice of how to donate is vast. Whether it’s a trending challenge or a micro-volunteering donation, it’s clear that social media is opening up a world of opportunities for individuals and charities to unite."

26 August 2014 MyIndia Initiative- Digital Volunteer Programme. Aimed at people in India "keen to use their personal social presence on different social media platforms to talk about Government schemes and programmes." Participants must be willing to use their personal Facebook and Twitter accounts "to help Government spread a word about its policies and programmes."
Jayne commentary: Apparently, this was announced originally back in February 2013. The comments about the effort are fascinating - it would be great to know if any of the comments influenced the campaign.

22 August 2014, Good Housekeeping UK: Quick Ways to Help Charities Online For Free. "Time poor? Get happiness rich with microvolunteering - the new way to help others." Jayne commentary: This article is representative of what so many journalists get wrong about virtual volunteering: they think it's new (it's more than 30 years old), they think it's great for people that don't have much time (most virtual volunteering assignments take just as much time as onsite volunteering assignments, just without the need to travel and park), and they think the words "micro volunteering" and "virtual volunteering" are inter-changeable - they just can't get it that, while micro volunteering online IS virtual volunteering, not all virtual volunteering is "micro."

14 August 2014 "The Smithsonian Wants You! (To Help Transcribe Its Collections)." The Smithsonian has opened up its Transcription Center website to the public and issued a called for volunteers to help decipher everything from handwritten specimen tags to the personal letters of iconic artists to early U.S. currency. The goal is to crowdsource the transcription of material that a computer just can’t decipher. By opening the transcription process up to the public, they hope to make those images not only accessible, but searchable and indexable to researchers and anyone else who’s interested across the globe. To avoid any typos or discrepancies, multiple volunteers work on and review each page, and a Smithsonian expert verifies the work for accuracy. During the project’s year of beta testing that began June 2013, 1,000 volunteers transcribed 13,000 pages of archived documents.

10 August 2014 "Ukrainian journalist Ihor Kostenko Named Wikipedian of the Year for 2014. Wikipedians are the people that contribute information to Wikipedia, and the vast majority, like Ihor Kostenko, are volunteers (they are not paid for the time they donate to Wikipedia to write and edit). Ihor Kostenko was a Ukrainian journalist and Euromaidan activist. For two and a half years, he wrote over 280 articles and made over 1,600 edits on the Ukrainian Wikipedia, and he created maintained the Ukrainian Wikipedians Facebook page. He created the idea of a Wiki Flashmob in Ukraine, a group volunteer event that invited Ukrainians to participate in a day of article-writing on Wikipedia; the event was undertaken on on April 27, 2014 after his death and was dedicated to his memory.

ESSA, CALGARY, CANADA 29 July 2014 "Virtual Firefighters needed in Essa Township" Essa’s fire department is turning to the Internet to recruit “Virtual Volunteer Firefighters to help the department "spread the word about positive safety habits and behaviors." The program uses social media like Twitter to send out information and recruit local residents and groups “to make safety rules into safety habits." The Essa Fire Department currently has about 60 volunteer firefighters.

CALIFORNIA. 24. July 2014. Thomas McKee's review of //**The**// **Last** //**Virtual Volunteering Guidebook**//"I highly recommend the Guidebook to all association leaders, directors of volunteers in agencies, NGO directors and faith based organizational leaders. Guidebook is a must read and resource guide that should be on the desk of any serious leader of volunteers."

AUSTIN, TEXAS, USA. 21 July 2014: Red Cross seeks digital volunteers in Central Texas. Organization asks for social-media savvy folks to help during emergencies. "Online social networks have forever changed the way people give and receive critical help and information during emergencies, and the American Red Cross is appealing for volunteers savvy in the social media space to join their team. These new Digital Volunteers will live-Tweet during severe weather, as well as create blog posts, upload photos and smartphone video and help the organization listen and respond to community questions and concerns."

MORRIS PLAINS, NEW JERSEY. 21 July 2014: Unseen And Uncounted: Virtual Volunteers A Secret Weapon “Mainstream organizations that promote volunteering, such as the Pew Center in Philadelphia, Pa., and Points of Light Foundation in Atlanta, Ga., need to start including questions about online volunteering in their surveys, Cravens said.”

SURREY, U.K. 19 July 2014: Volunteer in your pyjamas . Volunteer Centre Yate, based in Yate Library, is promoting micro volunteering, a new form of help anyone and everyone can give at home as well as in person.

AUSTIN, TEXAS. 12 July 2014: The Return of the Champ. Mick Foley swaps the wrestling ring for spoken word . "There's no shortage of great A-list celebrities doing great work, but there wasn't a long line to help wade in with RAINN. So I jumped in as a donor, then did online volunteering for two years, and really think of it as as important as anything I've ever done, inside the ring or outside."

TORONTO, CANADA, 3 July 2014: Koodonation Extends its Spirit of Social Good with Canada's First French Microvolunteering. More information about Koodonation.com

DECCAN, INDIA, 30 June 2014: New Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India is recruiting digital volunteers to promote his government's viewpoint and to create awareness regarding its programmes. The New Media Cell of the Information and Broadcasting is heading this strategy.

2 June 2014: información en español sobre el voluntariado virtual. A list of resources in Spanish.

LONDON, ENGLAND, U.K. 2 June 2014: Team London and Do-it.org announce plans for new ‘speed’ volunteering platform. Team London announced its plans for a new ‘speed’ volunteering and work platform in partnership with Do-it.org. "The new site, to be launched in the autumn, will offer ‘speed’ volunteering opportunities enabling younger people to volunteer quickly and easily for up to 6 hours, finding out about these opportunities via text messages and social media. Small organisations will be able to set up online communities of volunteers, who will be able to comment on and recommend opportunities to their friends via Facebook."

DALLAS, USA 14 May 2014: Lantana Army Lt. Serves as Virtual Volunteer in Daughter's Classroom. An Army lieutenant was able to FaceTime into his daughter's Lantana classroom Wednesday morning to serve as a virtual Watch DOGS dad for a day. Watch DOGS (Dads of Great Students) is group of fathers that volunteer to take turns visiting schools each day to help students learn and serve as positive male role models in the lives of students there.

MELBOURNE, AUSTRALIA May 21, 2014: Corporate Volunteering Goes Digital . At a Corporate Volunteering Breakfast hosted by NAB and Volunteering Victoria, keynote speaker Dennis Goldner, Chair of the Deloitte Foundation and National Leader of Responsible Business, said Deloitte's new digital micro volunteering program, launched in February, had built a compelling business case for corporate volunteering. The platform has 675 corporate volunteers enlisted and active on the supply side, with 46 Australian Not for Profits posting requests. Thus far it has seen 430 exchanges of skills and advice.

WASHINGTON, DC, May 2, 2014 Use of Internet, Social Networking Sites, and Mobile Technology for Volunteerism: Implications for Volunteer Recruitment and Engagement . This report was undertaken to provide insight and guidance to AARP about the effective use of the Internet, social media and mobile tools for increasing and strengthening volunteer recruitment and engagement; and thereby maximize community impact. Here is the full report .

SPAIN, 28 April 2014: Internet-mediated Volunteering in the EU: Its history, prevalence, and approaches and how it relates to employability and social inclusion. This research was for the ICT4EMPL Future Work project undertaken by the Information Society Unit of the Institute for Prospective Technological Studies at the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre.

ENGLAND, 25 April 2014: The Technological Cutting Edge: Virtual Volunteering for Shropshire’s Heritage. "If you are unable to physically visit a museum or archive centre to volunteer, for whatever reason, then this is the project for you. You will have a variety of tasks to choose from including spelling and grammar checking, linking data, transcribing documents, indexing and taking part in more in-depth research."

CHICAGO, 18 April 2014: Junior Achievement launches digital volunteer program. Junior Achievement of Chicago is part of a national effort by Junior Achievement USA® and the Citi Foundation to bring volunteers into local classrooms digitally to deliver JA programs. Chicago area schools are using video conferencing technology to allow volunteers to deliver JA Personal Finance® activities to students from their place of employment. This story includes a Citi volunteer digitally interacting with a JA student from Austin Business and Entrepreneurship Academy in Chicago.

DALLAS, 11 April 2014: 11 Citizen Science Projects That Need Your Help. A list of micro volunteering activities for a variety of organizations, including the Audubon Society, the SETI@Home organization, the Milky Way Project, and more.

DALLAS, 3 April 2014 /PRNewswire-USNewswire American Red Cross and Dell Open North Texas Social Media Listening and Engagement Center; The American Red Cross North Texas Region is expanding its ability to connect with people during disasters with a new Digital Operations Center. The American Red Cross North Texas Region was the first local chapter to use digital volunteers to assist its community during emergencies like the West, Texas explosion and tornadoes in Granbury and Cleburne. After Sandy made landfall, the Red Cross used the Digital Operations Center in Washington DC to collect more than 2 million public social media posts for analysis; for two months , more than 30 digital volunteers responded to thousands of individual posts through Facebook and Twitter. In nearly 90 cases, the Red Cross adjusted its services based on information gained through social data and the Digital Operations Center. The latest grant from Dell is also helping the Red Cross expand its Digital Volunteer Program to train more people who will engage online with the public during emergencies.Digital Volunteers are specially trained to use social media to engage with people who need help or emotional support and provide the Red Cross with real-time situational awareness. In the past 24 months, more than 160 people have been trained nationwide and have started working as Digital Volunteers. Volunteers have served during tornado outbreaks, wildfires, hurricanes and emergencies. The new Dell grant will enable the Red Cross to add an online, self-paced version of the Digital Volunteer training and expand the program to 10 Red Cross chapters across the nation. The Red Cross aims to add 200 additional digital volunteers by 2015. Visit redcross.org/dfw to enroll in the North Texas Region's Digital Volunteer Training.

MOSCOW, RUSSIA, 26 March 2014: U.S. Online Education Site Coursera Expands Russian Reach Coursera, founded in 2012 by Stanford professors Daphne Koller and Andrew Ng, will translate their courses into Russian as part of a mass campaign to translate their material into different languages. Their site follows the idea of MOOC — massive open online courses — which means it gives access to different courses for free. The company charges only for issuing certificates to students and for certifying different courses. ABBYY Language Services, a for-profit company, is recruiting and coordinating online volunteers to provide content and translation. There are about 1,000 volunteer translators. Some volunteers are motivated by an eagerness to practice their English. Others are drawn by the bonuses the participation in the project gives them. The best translators may get a Coursera certificate for free for any course they would like to take.

25 March 2014: Wikipedia founder responds to pro-alt-med petition; skeptics cheer Wikipedia’s co-founder Jimmy Wales this week responded firmly in the negative to a Change.org petition created by alternative medicine and holistic healing advocates. "Skeptics have battled promoters of pseudoscience and nonsense on Wikipedia since the beginning of the site, long before this blog existed. As a result, the encyclopedia has developed extensive rules regarding evidence and what they call 'fringe theories', to guard against a flood of nonsense. The existence of these rules was one of the reasons I encouraged skeptics (who often are cynical about the accuracy of Internet information) to get involved." The blog lauds Guerrilla Skepticism on Wikipedia, a group of independent online volunteers that work to improve Wikipedia pages for "skeptic spokespeople", provide "noteworthy" citations in various articles, and remove unsourced claims from paranormal and pseudoscientific pages.

LONDON, U.K., 20 March 2014 Dozens of people micro-volunteering with the help from Volunteer Centre Southwark, "On Friday 14th March we hosted a Micro-Volunteering Day right here at Volunteer Centre Southwark in Elephant and Castle."

BOULDER, COLORADO: 14 March 2014: Counting Craters: YOU Can Help Map the Moon "A new study comparing the accuracy of crater counting from thousands of volunteers with that of experts shows that crowdsourcing science works." CosmoQuest is a citizen science website that provides a web-interface that allows anyone with an internet connection to explore data from several NASA spacecraft of three worlds in our solar system: the moon, Vesta, and Mercury.

BOULDER, COLORADO, 13 March 2014: CU-Boulder-led study on lunar crater counting shows crowdsourcing effective, accurate tool "A new study led by the University of Colorado Boulder showed that as a group, volunteer counters who examined a particular patch of lunar real estate using NASA images did just as well in identifying individual craters as professional crater counters with five to 50 years of experience." A paper on the subject was published online March 4 in the journal Icarus. The crater-counting effort was initiated by CosmoQuest, a citizen science Web project that contributes real science to NASA space missions through the use of volunteers.

DENVER, COLORADO, 10 March 2014: DigitalGlobe launches crowdsource search for missing Malaysian plane: DigitalGlobe is enlisting the crowd to scan and tag images of more than 1,200 square miles of ocean for any visible evidence that could help locate the Malaysia Airlines 777 aircraft that went missing this weekend. The Longmont-based earth-imagery company deployed its FirstLook service on Sunday, directing two of its five satellites to snap photos of the area in the Gulf of Thailand, where investigators suspected the plane may have crashed, and then activated its crowdsourcing platform, Tomnod, on Monday afternoon.

PORTLAND, OREGON, 7 March 2014: Citizen Science' Gains Momentum In Northwest And Nationally, a story from NPR about the trend is called "citizen science," which can take the form of monitoring, data collection and reporting by remote volunteers, as well as crowd-sourced science. The article mentions several of these types of programs.

PORTLAND, OREGON, 6 March 2014: Why did we call it the LAST guidebook?, a blog by Jayne Cravens describing why it's called The Last Virtual Volunteering Guidebook.

PHILADELPHIA, PENNSYLVANIA, 5 March 2014: Online Communities Depend on Online Volunteers, a blog for NTEN: The Nonprofit Technology Network by Susan Ellis. The Internet is a volunteer-rich environment on a global scale, and nowhere is this more evident than in its online communities. These online communities are mostly started by one or two highly motivated individuals and operate on the principle of exchange. If you manage an online community, these are some tips on thinking about your community members as your volunteers.

LONDON, 5 March 2014: Is microvolunteering the future of giving?, From The Guardian, focused on virtual volunteering, as micro volunteering, in the U.K.

WINDSOR, AUSTRALIA, 5 March 2014: Microvolunteering On the Rise, from Pro Bono Australia. Similar to the story in The Guardian (see above), but includes onsite volunteering in its definition of micro volunteering.

BRUSSELS, 26 February 2014: New EU aid volunteers program to make a 'concrete, positive difference'. "From 2014-2020, the European Commission expects to facilitate the deployment of more than 3,950 EU citizens to disaster-affected countries. An additional 1,990 humanitarian apprenticeships will be offered within the European Union, and some 10,000 home-based “online volunteers” will be responsible for tasks ranging from graphic design and translation to providing advice and support. It is also expected that more than 4,400 people from local organizations in non-EU, disaster-affected countries will also benefit from the chance to undertake training and job shadowing within European humanitarian organizations." (note: guidebook co-author Jayne Cravens  has been working on the online volunteering aspect of this initiative).

BRUSSELS, 25 February 2014: EU Aid Volunteers: the initiative takes shape. Envisaged by the Treaty of Lisbon, the "EU Aid Volunteers" programme will mobilize Europeans through with humanitarian organizations to address aid and development initiatives. "Trained volunteers will have a variety of options: from performing online tasks from home, through work at the offices of humanitarian organisation inside the European Union, to deployment to EU-funded humanitarian operations around the world." (note: guidebook co-author Jayne Cravens has been working on the online volunteering aspect of this initiative).

LONDON: Microvolunteering Day, #microday, 15 March, a day to promote micro volunteering - short-term volunteering tasks that can be done in just a few minutes, without any ongoing commitment by the volunteer. Micro volunteering can be online or onsite. Also known as episodic volunteering. 2014 is the first year for this event.

SAN FRANCISCO, 21 February 2014: Our 10+ Year Love Affair with Virtual Volunteering (and the New Book That Makes Us Smile), a blog by VolunteerMatch about its association with virtual volunteering since the mid 1990s.

QUEENS, NY, 7 February 2014: St. John’s University’s Unveils New Virtual Volunteer Income Tax Assistance (VITA) Center. To date, approximately 400 St. John’s student volunteers have prepared income tax returns, obtaining almost $10 million in refunds for nearly 5000 VITA clients in Brooklyn and Queens, most of whom received earned income tax credits that are used to pay for food, clothing and rent. VITA is an IRS program, and St. John’s partners with Foodbank NYC to participate. Clients are able to access virtual drop-off sites throughout the city to upload their tax documentation to a secure website.

NEW YORK, 4 February 2014: In Texting Era, Crisis Hotlines Put Help at Youths’ Fingertips "It was in many ways a typical exchange on a crisis hotline, except it took place entirely by texting." Article about Crisis Text Line, a nonprofit offering counseling by highly-trained volunteers via text, and other nonprofits that are offering this kind of counseling as well. "Texting has become such a fundamental way to communicate, particularly among people under 20... Texting provides privacy that can be crucial if a person feels threatened by someone near them, counselors say. It also looks more natural if the teenager is in public. ... For counselors, texting allows them to deal with more than one person at a time and to introduce experts into a conversation without transferring or placing a caller on hold. Exchanges by text, they point out, can also resume more seamlessly after an interruption, because a written record of previous conversations already exists."

SAN FRANCISCO, 31 January 2014: What Does Sherlock Have to Do with Virtual Volunteering?, a blog by VolunteerMatch about Jayne Cravens guest hosting Twitter Talk Tuesday, VolunteerMatch’s monthly Twitter chat.

PORTLAND, OREGON, 28 January 2014: accessibility, diversity & virtual volunteering A blog by Jayne Cravens about the detailed information in The Last Virtual Volunteering Guidebook regarding creating a welcoming environment for volunteers.

SAN FRANCISCO, 21 January 21, 2014: #vmtalk tweet chat regarding Virtual Volunteering. hosted by VolunteerMatch, with guest, Jayne Cravens / jcravens42.

LONDON, 10 January 2014, The Globe and Mail - Mining the technological genius of the crowd: Do we need technology visionaries to tell us what we want – singular, charismatic leaders like Steve Jobs or Mark Zuckerberg to decide what the next smart device should look like, invent the next social network we’ll all join or dream up the next must-have app we’ll all download? Or can that instead be done by the “crowd” – the nameless and unheralded users, hackers and coders behind the scenes?

CHICAGO, IL, January 9, 2014 /3BL Media/ – The National Community Tax Coalition (NCTC), in partnership with the JPMorgan Chase Foundation, is launching the Virtual Volunteer Income Tax Assistance (VITA) pilot program, a new program that uses technology to connect low- and-moderate-income taxpayers with critical tax preparation services free of charge. Virtual VITA will enable underserved taxpayers to access VITA tax preparation services where they otherwise might not be readily available. The program utilizes upgraded technology, like cloud-based servers and video chat, to provide high-quality assistance to clients wherever they are – without requiring clients to be present with the preparer and wait hours at a traditional VITA site. News article about VITA pilot program .

AMMAN, Jan 07 2014 /Zawya- Jordanian social entrepreneur named in Forbes' 30 under 30 list. Founder of Nakhweh, Arab world's volunteerism and development network, was named among the Social Entrepreneurs of Forbes Magazine's 30 under 30 list issued yesterday. Kamel Al-Asmar's name showed in the list that consists of thirty pioneering global social entrepreneurs , three of which are Arabs from Jordan, Egypt and Bahrain. Specialized panel of international judges has selected the final list of the 30 change makers. Nakhweh is an initiative founded by Al-Asmar in Amman back in 2009 as the first website to connect volunteers with volunteering opportunities in Jordan, then expanded its work to cover most of the Arab countries. It announced the launch of a new crowdsourcing and online volunteering project under the name "Al Deewan " to grow their database with the help of volunteers from all over Arabia.

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