Research & Case Studies Regarding Virtual Volunteering

2021

November 29, 2021: "Multifaceted volunteering: The volunteering experience in the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic in light of volunteering styles." By Liat Kulik, School of Social Work, Bar-Ilan University, Ramat-Gan, Israel. Anal Soc Issues Public Policy. 2021;21:1222–1242. Official summary: The contemporary media environment transforms the organization-volunteer relationship by attenuating the formation of organizational belonging, often thought to be the result of direct interactions and face-to-face meetings. We examine and compare factors that influence offline and online volunteering. We investigate the ties for communicating about volunteering that bind individuals to nonprofit organizations (NPOs) and the ways that multiple levels of identification influence volunteer commitment to these NPOs. Using structural equation modeling, the results from an online survey of 816 volunteers suggest that online volunteers, unlike offline volunteers, are not motivated to volunteer more by exclusive relationships with organizational members or their volunteer identity. Their volunteering is related to their communication ties with both members and nonmembers and their identification with both the organization and the social issue. We discuss implications regarding how the changed dynamics in online volunteering complicates the traditional organization-volunteer relationship.
October 15, 2021: "Online interaction of Olympic volunteers after the Games." By M. Sukharkova. The article is about the community of Olympic volunteers after the 2014 Winter Olympics and Paralympic Games in Sochi, Krasnodar Krai, Russia, studying their online activity in social network “Vkontakte”. The study sought answers to the following research questions: do volunteers maintain social online interactions five or more years after the event, if volunteers continue online interactions, and what topics are the most popular for discussion in the volunteer community. It is proved that volunteering at major sporting events contributes to the development of the social capital of volunteers, including by expanding the circle of acquaintances, that is, social interactions. At the same time, social networks have a great influence on the reproduction of social capital, so the indicators of online interactions of volunteers can indicate whether the volunteers support the circles of social interactions acquired while working at the games, and, thus, whether the volunteers support and use the social capital acquired while working at the event. The study shows that the highest indicators of volunteer activity in the online community were noted from 2014 to 2016 and that the most relevant topics among the participants of the online community are the topics of volunteering: both memories of working at the games, as well as information about other volunteer programs and other topics, for example, tourism, etc. Published 15 October 2021 in Digital Sociology.
July 28, 2021: Mentoring in the Time of COVID-19: An Analysis of Online Focus Groups with Mentors to Youth. By Michelle R. Kaufman, Kate Wright, Jeannette Simon, Giselle Edwards, Johannes Thrul and David L. DuBois. This study explored the experiences of mentors to youth during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic. Six online focus groups were conducted with 39 mentors. Any mentor currently in a mentoring relationship, regardless of type, was eligible. Using Facebook groups, moderators posted questions and prompts, and mentor participants responded using textual comments. Mentees’ access to technology and privacy were the biggest challenges faced. Mentor concerns for their mentees varied, including mental health, school, family finances, and access to instrumental support and food. Mentor help involved routinely connecting with mentees and providing academic support. Mentors requested ideas and resources for connecting with mentees and an online mentor support group. The research found that virtually connecting with mentees can be difficult for mentors without prior, organized planning and that mentors need support during the pandemic through meaningful resources or virtual support groups. "The two most frequent requests for support were discovering new ways to connect with their mentees during a pandemic and being part of a support group for mentors." Another excerpt: "Across the board, participants agreed that an online support group for mentors would be incredibly helpful. Sharing ideas, discussing experiences, and connecting with other mentors about their own stress and anxiety would provide a much-needed outlet and resource during such unprecedented times."
July 15, 2021: Setting up a Digital Buddies project – What We Learned. The Digital Buddies started during the Covid 19 pandemic to enable older people in the Scottish Borders to connect digitally with friends, family, groups & the wider world. Digital Buddies teamed the older people up with a digital buddy, often a family member, friend or neighbor. The buddy then supports the person with whatever they wish to learn to do at their own pace, with the aid of step by step picture instructions and our assistance. We also provide a tablet and access to the internet to those who do not have access to technology. Currently there are just 15 older people in the Borders participating in Digital Buddies. Many were apprehensive at the beginning, as they worried they might not remember or manage. With the help from their buddies they are now regularly using their digital device to video call with friends and family, join local groups, meetings or classes that have moved online in Covid19, attend virtual religious services, do their shopping, and much more. Resources provided to participants include how to access the accessibility settings on the tablet devices used, how to charge the devices and use them to listen to podcasts, access email, etc., as well as digital inclusion tips. This is an outstanding case study with in-depth analysis on what worked and how challenges were addressed, with an eye to helping others set up a similar program.
Older Adults' Attitudes Toward Virtual Volunteering During the COVID-19 Pandemic. 12 April 2021. Journal of Applied Gerontology. By Peter C. Sun, Nancy Morrow-Howell, Elizabeth Pawloski, Alexander Helbach. This study explored older adults’ technology use patterns and attitudes toward virtual volunteering during the COVID-19 pandemic. A 22-item survey was administered to 229 volunteers in the St. Louis region who tutor children through the Oasis Intergenerational Tutoring program. Although most respondents are familiar with technology and expressed that they are likely to volunteer virtually, their responses varied significantly by age, education, gender, income, and school districts. Some tutors expressed that virtual volunteering may eliminate barriers to in-person volunteering, while others were concerned with establishing a personal connection with students online. These findings suggest that tutors anticipate both benefits and challenges with virtual volunteering and that efforts to engage older adults during the pandemic should factor in prior use of technology and ensure that different subgroups are not marginalized.
Building a Skills-Based, Remote Volunteer Program - A Look Into 12 Years of Partners in Food Solutions Operations. 3 February 2021. From Partners in Food Solutions. This paper is based on input from the three key teams that make our day-to-day work successful: our Volunteer Operations team who recruit and match volunteers, our Program Associates who oversee volunteer engagements across several programs and countries, and our Program Managers who serve as trusted advisors to clients and craft the projects that they work on with our corporate volunteers... This paper is intended to share our best practices around building and continuously improving a remote, skills-based volunteer program. A key learning: We have found that setting up successful engagements should always start with two things – first, the client’s motivation to engage. We often say that we work on a “pull model,” meaning that we only work on projects that a client asks for and prioritizes. In effect, they “pull” the expertise from us, we don’t “push” them into prescribed generic solutions. Second, engagements should be clearly structured from the beginning using well-scoped project charters that include transparent and realistic timelines, objectives, and deliverables.
The Role of Volunteer Experience on Performance on Online Volunteering Platforms. 6 February 2021. By Gloria Urrea of University of Colorado Boulder - Leeds School of Business and Eunae Yoo, Assistant Professor at Indiana University - Kelley School of Business.. Published in Psychology Organizations & Markets: Policies & Processes eJournal. Online volunteering platforms allow humanitarian organizations (HOs) to recruit volunteers to work remotely on projects. While the removal of time and space constraints enables HOs to scale up their volunteer force, HOs must manage greater variation in volunteers’ experience. In this study, we investigate the relationship between volunteers’ experience levels and two performance metrics on these platforms: project completion and volunteer retention. Moreover, we study when experience becomes more relevant to project completion depending on a project’s urgency (i.e., disaster response vs. development). To test these relationships, we collected a novel panel dataset from the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team Tasking Manager, on which volunteers contribute to mapping projects. Our dataset includes 5,162 online volunteering projects with 2,169,683 contributions by 96,450 volunteers. Using panel regression models, we show that a project’s completion rate significantly depends on the number of volunteers at each experience level (i.e., beginner, intermediate, advanced). Interestingly, we find that the counts of intermediate and advanced volunteers are equally valuable to project completion. Our analysis further indicates that beginner volunteers should be channeled to development projects and intermediate volunteers to disaster response projects to enhance project completion. For volunteer retention, we use parametric hazard models and find that volunteers are incentivized to return to online volunteering platforms more quickly when they are closer to attaining the next experience-based status. However, this effect weakens as volunteers reach higher statuses. Overall, our study sheds light on online volunteer management and offers operational insights for HOs as well as for online volunteering platforms.
The shifting sands of motivation: Revisiting what drives contributors in open source. 9 Jan 2021. By Marco Gerosa, Igor Wiese, Bianca Trinkenreich, Georg Link, Gregorio Robles, Christoph Treude, Igor Steinmacher, Anita Sarma. Paper submitted for 43rd ACM/IEEE International Conference on Software Engineering, Madrid, Spain, to take place June 2021. In this scientific study, the authors investigated why people join FOSS projects and why they continue contributing. One of our goals was to study how contributors' motivations have changed since the 2000s. A second goal was to take the research to the next level and investigate how people's motivations change as they continue contributing. The research is based on a questionnaire answered by almost 300 FOSS contributors in late 2020. The paper is summarized here. The paper's findings can be applied to many difference virtual volunteering scenarios, not just open source projects: Knowing how new and long-time contributors differ in motivation helps us discover how to support them better. For example, to attract and retain new contributors, who might become the future workforce, projects could invest in promoting career, fun, kinship, and learning, which are particularly relevant for young contributors. Because over time altruism becomes more important to contributors, FOSS projects aiming to retain experienced contributors, who tend to be core members or maintainers, could invest in strategies and tools showing how their work benefits the community and society (altruism) and improve social interactions. Also in response to the increased rank of altruism, hosting platforms could offer social features to pair those needing help with those willing to help, highlight when a contributor helps someone, and make it easier to show appreciation to others (similar to stars given to projects).

2020

Designing for Helpers: Identifying new design opportunities for digital volunteerism. By Khushnood Z. Naqshbandi, University of Sydney, Australia, Silas Taylor, University of New South Wales, Australia, Ajit Pillai, University of Sydney, Australia, and Naseem Ahmadpour, University of Sydney, Australia. Paper presented at Synergy - DRS International Conference 2020, 11-14 August, based in Sydney. Held online. A case study regarding Online Simulated Patient Interaction and Assessment (OSPIA), an online teleconferencing platform designed to support communication skills development of medical students at an Australian university. This platform allows medical students to conduct practice interviews with simulated patients (SPs) and receive feedback on these interactions. The simulated patients are volunteers who are recruited through online marketplaces like GoVolunteer, Seek volunteer. The volunteers play the role of a ‘patient’ based on a given script and then assess the performance of the medical student as a ‘doctor’. "we identified four areas of design opportunities to foster relatedness and gratitude in online volunteering and reduce disparities between online and physical volunteering experiences." https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2020.281.
The Challenges and Opportunities of Online Volunteering for COVID-19 Response in Iran: A Qualitative Study. July 2020. By Hamed Seddighi, University of Social Welfare and Rehabilitation Sciences, Tehran, Iran,, Ibrahim Salmani, School of Public Health, Shahid Sadoughi University of Medical Sciences, Yazd, Iran, Polina Ermolaeva and Olga Basheva, both of the Federal Center of Theoretical and Applied Sociology of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Kazan Federal University, Mehrab Shari Sedeh, Department of Disaster Public Health, School of Public Health, Tehran University of Medical Science. The aim of this brief report is to identify the challenges and opportunities of online volunteering to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic from the perspective of the managers of the Iranian Red Crescent Society (IRCS). Methods: In this study we have used a qualitative method including semi-structured interviews for investigating the opportunities and challenges of using virtual volunteers. The eligible participants meeting the inclusion criteria for this study were eight IRCS managers who had used online volunteers for COVID-19 pandemic response. Results: Having considered the interviews with IRCS managers, we finally found seven items as opportunities including safety, availability, recruiting more volunteers, cost reduction, participation, geographical scope, and local considerations. Moreover, five items were found as challenges of online volunteering in IRCS including lack of commitment, cultural issues, infrastructure, reimbursement, and volunteer management. Conclusion: Online volunteering is a significant opportunity for humanitarian organizations especially during epidemics like the current COVID-19. Online volunteering for COVID-19 response by the Red Crescent involved a wide range of people including young people, the elderly, people with disabilities and minority groups, and people in rural areas.
COVID-19 and its Impact on Volunteering: Moving Towards Virtual Volunteering. July 2020. Leisure Sciences. By Erik L. Lachance. Abstract: "These unprecedented times due to the COVID-19 pandemic have impacted the everyday lives of individuals. A particular activity impacted by this pandemic is leisure. Within leisure, an important activity to enhance social outcomes (e.g., civic participation) and the survival of organizations and events is volunteering. However, and given social distancing measures and the combination of postponements or cancelations of organizational or event operations, the traditional form of in-person volunteering is threatened. The purpose of this essay is to discuss opportunities and challenges for organizations and events to apply virtual volunteering as a strategy during the pandemic and beyond. Both opportunities (i.e., creating accessibility) and challenges (i.e., management process) are discussed according to pertinent literature. From this, an understanding of virtual volunteering’s value to create leisure opportunities during the COVID-19 pandemic and beyond is presented to advance its implementation in organization and events by leisure practitioners." A caution: this paper is full of many misstatements and mistaken assumptions. For instance, the paper says that more men than women volunteer online - this simply is NOT true at all, and the other research on this page bears that out.
Inside the struggle to control Russia's digital volunteering sector. 8 May 2020. "The Russian ecosystem of volunteering and mutual assistance that has arisen around COVID-19 is characterised by a marked predominance of digital platforms with some relation to the state, and by the crowding out of independent projects." This article lists and summarizes the many, various online efforts in Russia by citizens acting on their own, semi-political groups, media outlets and the government to mobilize volunteers online to take off-line action to help vulnerable neighbors struggling because of the global pandemic. Mentions widespread use of Telegram in some efforts.
Networked volunteering during the 2013 Sardinian floods. Participations: Journal of Audience and Reception Studies. May 2020. Lorenza Parisi, Link Campus University, Rome, Italy; Francesca Comunello, Lumsa University, Rome, Italy; Andrea Amico, Università degli Studi di Roma La Sapienza, Italy. "The article describes how ordinary citizens used Twitter as an emergency-management tool during the heavy floods that occurred in Sardinia, Italy, in November 2013. The case study constitutes an example of digital volunteering in the aftermath of a disaster event... The article highlights the role of Twitter celebrities and engaged ordinary users as digital volunteers and explains how they succeeded in activating bottom-up disaster-relief oriented communication."
How a face-to-face mentoring program, StreetWise Partners in New York City, is transitioning to virtual volunteering during the Covid-19 pandemic. Case study by Gallup, one of the program's funders. March 2020. StreetWise provides young adults and skilled immigrants who are unemployed or working in low-wage, low-growth jobs with critical mentorship to unlock careers traditionally unavailable to them. StreetWise has shifted its in-person mentorship approach to a series of virtual programs that engages volunteers and clients in one-on-one employment support and emergency needs; virtual mock interviews; and a 13-week remote workforce mentoring program.

E-Mentoring Supplement to the Elements of Effective Practice for Mentoring (PDF). December 2019. MENTOR, formerly the National Mentoring Partnership, published this set of standards for online mentoring programs, and it includes case studies from various online mentoring programs to support its recommendations regarding screening, recruiting, training, monitoring and closure. Its list of references on pages 24, 81 and 82 cite several case studies, articles and research papers regarding online mentoring.

Online volunteering at DigiVol: an innovative crowd-sourcing approach for heritage tourism artefacts preservation. February 2019. By Irit Alony, Debbie Haski-Leventhal, Leonie Lockstone-Binney ORCID Icon, Kirsten Holmes & Lucas C. P. M. Meijs. Journal of Heritage Tourism. "This article is based on a case study of an innovative crowd-sourcing initiative of integrating on-site and online volunteers for the preservation and documentation of heritage artefacts: the DigiVol program at the Australian Museum, Sydney. This large citizen science volunteer program has digitised an unprecedented portion of the museum’s collections and has been recognised in Australia and internationally as a best practice ‘volunteer digitisation service’ model. Seeking further empirical support for the emerging concept of ‘recruitability’ from the volunteering literature (i.e. the ability of volunteer organisations to recruit and retain volunteers), this research used case study methodology. Based on interviews, focus groups, and document analyses, the article identifies key elements of innovation and effectiveness in DigiVol practices. The article concludes with recommendations for programs wishing to follow best practice and expand their recruitability, to digitise and preserve artefacts, and therefore support science, tourism and education."

Internet Use and Volunteering: Relationships and Differences Across Age and Applications. February 2019, Volume 30, Issue 1, pp 87–97. By Maximilian Filsinger and Markus Freitag. VOLUNTAS: International Journal of Voluntary and Nonprofit Organizations. "The internet plays an important part in our daily lives. In this paper, we ask whether internet use is negatively related to civic life when focusing specifically on formal volunteering. Furthermore, we account for group-specific and activity-specific internet effects. Using a representative population sample of Switzerland, we show that internet use decreases the probability of undertaking voluntary work. This result is qualified in two respects: First, we find that the negative relationship between internet use and volunteering is more powerful among young people than older adults who are more likely to volunteer when they use the internet. Second, the use of social networking sites seems to mitigate the negative influence of internet use on volunteering."

The Civic Labor of Volunteer Moderators Online. By J. Nathan Matias. Center for Information Technology Policy and Department of Psychology, Princeton University, USA. Published April 4, 2019. Abstract: Volunteer moderators create, support, and control public discourse for millions of people online, even as moderators’ uncompensated labor upholds platform funding models. What is the meaning of this work and who is it for? In this article, I examine the meanings of volunteer moderation on the social news platform reddit. Scholarship on volunteer moderation has viewed this work separately as digital labor for platforms, civic participation in communities, or oligarchy among other moderators. In mixed-methods research sampled from over 52,000 subreddit communities and in over a dozen interviews, I show how moderators adopt all of these frames as they develop and re-develop everyday meanings of moderation—facing the platform, their communities, and other moderators alike. I also show how this civic notion of digital labor brings clarity to a strike by moderators in July 2015. Volunteer governance remains a common approach to managing social relations, conflict, and civil liberties online. Our ability to see how communities negotiate the mean

Online Volunteering, A Way to Reduce Health Inequalities: A Review Study. 2019. Seddighi, Hamed & Salmani, Ibrahim. Journal of Community Health Research. "Volunteering is a way for community participation and involving local social capital. Volunteering has potential to enhance wellbeing and reducing health inequalities. The aim of this study is to evaluate the effects of online volunteering on people well-being and reducing inequalities." Jayne's note: the article doesn't really explore this - it's more of the authors' introduction to virtual volunteering.

International Review on Public and Nonprofit Marketing. December 2018. International Review on Public and Nonprofit Marketing, Volume 15, Issue 4, pp 531–552 By Filipa Silva, Teresa Proença and Marisa R. Ferreira. This study seeks to understand the factors that cause and sustain online volunteerism from the volunteer’s perspective, namely the motivations that lead the individual to volunteer online, as well as the resulting experiences and consequences/benefits. We did twenty-four interviews with volunteers of several nationalities. The results contribute to the understanding and development of new knowledge about the online volunteering process, more precisely for a better understanding of how NPOs can best use this resource, namely in the management, recruiting and retaining of volunteers. The main conclusions show that altruistic motivations and learning/career rewards are the most common motivations. Regarding the intention for permanence, the satisfaction associated with the experience and the initial motivations are shown to be decisive. The consequences/benefits are essentially associated with the acquired learning which volunteers consider to be a valuable future asset, and the intrinsic reward of self-actualization and e-empowerment.

Uncovering the Periphery: A Qualitative Survey of Episodic Volunteering in Free/Libre and Open Source Software Communities. October 2018. By Ann Barcomb, Andreas Kaufmann, Dirk Riehle, Klaas-Jan Stol, and Brian Fitzgerald. Transactions on Software Engineering, IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers). The association is chartered under this name and it is the full legal name. "Free/Libre and Open Source Software (FLOSS) communities are composed, in part, of volunteers, many of whom contribute infrequently. However, these infrequent volunteers contribute to the sustainability of FLOSS projects, and should ideally be encouraged to continue participating, even if they cannot be persuaded to contribute regularly. Infrequent contributions are part of a trend which has been widely observed in other sectors of volunteering, where it has been termed “episodic volunteering” (EV)... EV is widespread in FLOSS communities, although not specifically managed. We suggest several recommendations for managing EV based on a framework drawn from the volunteering literature. Also, episodic volunteers make a wide range of value-added contributions other than code, and they should neither be expected nor coerced into becoming habitual volunteers." Fascinating that this paper never refers to micro volunteering, even though many of the volunteer scenarios it is describing are exactly that.

Case Study: The National Map Corps | Crowdsourcing Map Data. March 2018. Over the past two decades, the U.S. Geological Survey has sponsored various kinds of crowdsourcing projects for collecting map data. Volunteers in the Earth Science Corps, for example, annotated paper topographic maps; in another project, participants collected data points using handheld GPS devices; and in 2006, volunteers used Web-based technology to input data. In 2012, the USGS launched The National Map Corps to meet the need for current, high-quality, nationwide data on schools and other buildings. TNMCorps volunteers are successfully editing 10 different types of structures in all 50 States, including schools, hospitals, post offices, police stations and other important public buildings. Requirements to become a TNMCorps volunteer are simple: computer access to the Internet, an email address, a self-identified username and a willingness to learn and explore new places. Using National Agricultural Imagery Program imagery or The National Map as their primary base layers, volunteers collect and improve data on structures by adding new features, removing obsolete points and correcting existing data. Fellow volunteers peer-review the edits, which are incorporated into The National Map and ultimately into US Topo maps. TNMCorps uses gamification techniques and a mixture of traditional and social media for recruiting, engaging and motivating volunteers. Gamification includes easy sign up, virtual recognition badges, friending, map challenges, social media interaction and a tiered editing approach, techniques that have all proven successful.

Volunteer retention, burnout and dropout in online voluntary organizations: stress, conflict and retirement of Wikipedians. By Piotr Konieczny. 2018. Research in Social Movements, Conflicts and Change, Volume 42. Emerald Publishing Limited, pp.199 - 219. This study investigates why contributors (online volunteers or Wikipedians) to Wikipedia reduce activity or discontinue volunteering and if this provides lessons from other virtual volunteering initiatives. This analysis, based on a survey of over a hundred English Wikipedia's volunteers with the highest edit count, identifies a gap in the research on volunteers burnout/drop-out, namely the importance of inter-personal conflict as an understudied yet highly significant factor. According to research cited in the paper, 1% of Wikipedia editors are credited with about 70% of the value created; Top 200 active contributors are responsible for approximately 12.5% of the site’s content, and Top 1,200 for nearly 30%; however, almost all existing research on burnout and dropout among Wikipedians has primarily focused on the problems with retention of new editors on English Wikipedia.

Bridging or Deepening the Digital Divide: Influence of Household Internet Access on Formal and Informal Volunteering. Jaclyn Piatak, Nathan Dietz, Brice McKeever. August 23, 2018. Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, ARNOVA. Little is known about whether the lack of digital access - the digital divide - has repercussions on connections offline in the community. The researchers examine the influence of access on volunteering across four critical aspects—structure, time devoted, level of professionalization, and pathways to volunteering. "We find home Internet access has an independent influence on volunteering even after controlling for socioeconomic status. Those with access are more likely to volunteer, formally and informally, and are more likely to become volunteers because they were asked. However, digitally unconnected volunteers devote more time. Nonprofit organizations and government agencies should be strategic and inclusive in their volunteer recruitment efforts to ensure they recruit qualified and dedicated volunteers rather than rely solely on digital recruitment strategies."

Doing Good Online: The Changing Relationships Between Motivations, Activity, and Retention Among Online Volunteers. Jul 5, 2018. By Joe Cox, Eun Young Oh, Brooke Simmons, Gary Graham, Anita Greenhill, Chris Lintott, Karen Masters, and Jamie Woodcock. Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly. "Advances in Internet technology are making it possible for individuals to volunteer online and participate in research-based activities of nonprofit organizations. Using survey data from a representative sample of such contributors, this study investigates their motivations to volunteer for five online volunteering projects using the Volunteer Functions Inventory. We explore relationships between these six categories of motivation and actual recorded measures of both volunteer activity and retention. We also use quantile regression analysis to investigate the extent to which these motivations change at different stages in the volunteer process. Our results show that volunteers’ activity and retention tend to associate significantly and positively with the motivations of understanding and values, as well as significantly and negatively with the social and career motivations. We also find the importance of motivations changes significantly across the stages of volunteer engagement. In some cases, especially the understanding motivation, the changes observed for activity and retention are markedly different."

Online volunteering as a means to overcome unequal participation? The profiles of online and offline volunteers compared. May 23, 2018. Kathrin Ackermann Goethe University Frankfurt, Germany; University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands Anita Manatschal University of Neuchâtel, Switzerland. New Media & Society, Sage Journals. "A key question regarding the ongoing process of digitalization is whether it enables societies to overcome patterns of inequality or whether these patterns are fostered in the digital sphere. The article addresses this question for the case of online volunteering by examining the profiles of online and offline volunteers in terms of sociodemographics, resources, networks, and psychological engagement. We apply quantitative methods using a unique data set that provides comprehensive information on online volunteering. Our results suggest that two mechanisms are at work simultaneously: mobilization and reinforcement. The profile of “pure” online volunteers differs from the profile of “pure” offline volunteers (mobilization). Meanwhile, the hybrid type combining online and offline volunteering attracts individuals resembling offline (reinforcement) and online volunteers (mobilization). Thus, online volunteering seems to be both: a remedy for existing inequalities in volunteering and a way to reinforce existing patterns of social participation in increasingly digitized societies." One commentary: despite the title, this paper does not address anything regarding people with disabilities, and research by Jayne Cravens has shown virtual volunteering does help these people "overcome unequal participation" in many cases.

Online Prosocial Behaviors. 2018. By Michelle F. Wright, Pennsylvania State University, USA and William Stanley Pendergrass, American Public University System, USA. Encyclopedia of Information Science and Technology, Fourth Edition. 2018 "Although there are many investigations and news stories about negative online behaviors, less attention has been given to positive online behaviors. There are many opportunities to receive help or to perform prosocial acts through electronic technologies. This chapter focuses on online prosocial behaviors. The chapter includes sections that examine "the unique characteristics of the cyber context and how such characteristics are conductive to prosocial behaviors," that focus "on various online prosocial behavior, including helping through electronic groups, online mentoring, online donations to charities, virtual voluntarism, and helping in other electronic contexts (e.g., social networking sites)," that investigate "the value of online prosocial behaviors to the giver and receiver," that provide "theoretical explanations for why people engage in online prosocial behavior," and describe "solutions and recommendations for organizations wanting to harness electronic technologies for various helping opportunities." The paper also presents suggestions for future research on online prosocial behavior.

2017

Digital Meaning: Exploring and Understanding the Motivations and Experiences of Virtual Volunteers. 2017. Vincent Xuan Feng, and Tuck Wah Leong, both from Faculty of Engineering and Information Technology, University of Technology Sydney, Australia. In Proceedings of the 29th Australian Conference on Human-Computer Interaction, Brisbane, QLD, Australia, November 2017. "This paper identified a gap in the HCI literature in relation to formal, organisation-led virtual volunteering and discusses findings from a recent study detailing the main motivations of virtual volunteers and how ICTs influenced their volunteering experience. Example design considerations and future research opportunities are provided."

Managing Casual Contributors. Ann Barcomb is a PhD candidate and research assistant at the University of Limerick in Ireland.Her research focuses on the management of episodic, or casual, volunteersin open source and builds upon her prior work comparing free software and social entrepreneurship, some of which also cited on the wiki page you are reading now. She did a presentation at the Open Source Summit Europe 2017 (October) on what she calls "Casual Contributors" to open source projects: episodic online volunteers. Her presentation, based on her research, reviews factors of engagement and retention of "Casual Contributors" and offers tips on effective management of these volunteers.

"Digital activism: After the hype." September 2017. By Anne Kaun Södertörn, University Sweden, and Julie Uldam, Roskilde University, Denmark. Published in New Media & Society. "Research on digital activism has gained traction in recent years. At the same time, it remains a diverse and open field that lacks a coherent mode of inquiry. For the better or worse, digital activism remains a fuzzy term. In this introduction to a special issue on digital activism, we review current attempts to periodize and historicize digital activism. Although there is growing body of research on digitial activism, many contributions remain limited through their ahistorical approach and the digital universalism that they imply. Based on the contributions to the special issue, we argue for studying digital activisms in a way that traverses a two-dimensional axis of digital technologies and activist practices, striking the balance between context and media-specificity."

Task Workflow Design and its impact on performance and volunteers' subjective preference in Virtual Citizen Science. By James Sprinks Jessica Wardlaw Robert Houghton Steven Bamford and Jeremy Morleya.International Journal of Human-Computer Studies, Volume 104, Pages 50-63, August 2017. "A study was performed with the Planet Four: Craters project to investigate the effect of task workflow design on both volunteer experience and the scientific results they produce... The interface with the least number of task types, variety and autonomy resulted in the greatest data coverage. Agreement, both between participants and with the expert equivalent, was significantly improved when the interface most directly afforded tasks that captured the required underlying data (i.e. crater position or diameter)."

Significant concerns influence online pro bono volunteering of faculty members. By Osama Ahmed Abdelkader. Computers in Human Behavior, Volume 73, August 2017, Pages 547-553. "This study investigates the significant concerns that prevent faculty members (FMs) from providing additional efforts of Online Pro Bono Volunteering (OPV). The influences of gender, age and academic achievement (degree/experience/specialty) were tested with the Willingness to provide OPV (WOPV) and the Extent of providing OPV (EOPV). Twenty-three concerns were tested to explore their impact, nine of which were deleted after the Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA). The other significant fourteen concerns were grouped in four categories depending on EFA to losses, interest, followers and proficiency. This study presents two main contributions: first, a new instrument to measure the concern factors of OPV, second, a proposed model to support practitioners, developers and researchers who are interested in OPV. Future researchers can extend the applicability of this model to other areas of research and they can present comparable studies that consider various nationalities, cultures, religions or occupations."

"Temporal Motivations of Volunteers to Participate in Cultural Crowdsourcing Work." By Sultana Lubna Alam, Department of Information Systems and Business Analytics, Deakin Business School, Deakin University, Geelong, Australia and John Campbell, Research School of Management, ANU College of Business and Economics, Australian National University, Canberra, Australia.Information Systems Research, July 2017. "Crowdsourcing (CS) by cultural and heritage institutions engage volunteers in online projects without monetary compensation. Uncertainty concerning online volunteer motivation has led to a growing body of academic research. This study contributes to that debate, by extending focus to CS volunteer work in nonprofit cultural institutions where no monetary benefit is offered to volunteers. This study examines motivations of high performing volunteers in a newspaper digitisation CS project, initiated by the National Library of Australia. Volunteers are motivated by personal, collective, and external factors, and these motivations change over time. Volunteers initially show intrinsic motivations, though both intrinsic and extrinsic motivations play a critical role in their continued participation. Volunteer contributions range from data shaping (e.g., correcting digitised optical character recognition data) to knowledge shaping (e.g., shaping historical data through tagging and commenting, but also through development of norms and social roles). The locus of motivation (intrinsic or extrinsic) also changes with different kinds of contributions. The distinction between data and knowledge shaping contributions, and the locus and focus of motivation behind these activities, has implications for the design of CS systems. Design for improved usability through cognitive and physical system affordances and development of social mechanisms for ongoing participation is discussed."

Centralized Crowdsourcing in Disaster Management: Findings and Implications. By D. Auferbauer, Austrian Institute of Technology, Vienna, Austria and H. Tellioğlu TU Wien, (Vienna Univ. of Technology), Vienna, Austria. Presented as a part of C&T '17 Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Communities and Technologies, Troyes, France June 2017, Pages 173-182. "Computer supported cooperative work (CSCW) has become an important aspect in crisis and disaster management. Volunteers undertaking relief efforts in affected areas are increasingly using information and communication technologies to coordinate their work. Relief organizations are recognizing this trend and have started to adapt new communication channels to interact with citizens. In this paper, we describe the crowdtasking approach, a centralized form of crowdsourcing for crisis and disaster management. We present a prototype implementation of the approach and report on our findings from the system's first field trial. We conclude by discussing implications of this approach for CSCW and community building in crisis and disaster management. Lastly, we give an outlook on future research based on our experience with crowdtasking."

"A framework for analyzing digital volunteer contributions in emergent crisis response efforts." By Chul Hyun Park and Erik W Johnston. Arizona State University, USA.New Media & Society, May 22, 2017 "Advances in information, communication, and computational technologies allow digital volunteer networks formed by concerned publics across the globe to contribute to an effective response to disasters and crises. Digital volunteer networks are event-centric and emergent networks. Currently, the literature is sharply growing in the fields of communication, computer science, emergency management, and geography. This article aims to assess the current status of the literature and suggest a comprehensive conceptual framework of digital volunteer networks in response to disasters and crises. This framework is based on a traditional input–process–output model consisting of three dimensions: the disaster and crisis context, a voluntary response process, and outputs and outcomes. We also discuss challenges of digital volunteer networks for crisis response. This article is expected to contribute to the development of related theories and hypotheses and practical strategies for managing digital volunteer networks."

"Classifying and Relating Different Types of Online and Offline Volunteering by Jennifer Ihm, School of Communications, Kwangwoon University, Seoul, Republic of Korea. January 2017. VOLUNTAS: International Journal of Voluntary and Nonprofit Organizations, February 2017, Volume 28, Issue 1, pp 400–419. "The contemporary media environment allows for online volunteering where volunteers can participate without being physically present or being affiliated with a traditional organization. Challenging the traditional types of volunteering and accounting for the new trends, this study identifies different types of online and offline volunteering and examines the relationship between them. Drawing on online survey data from 816 U.S.-based volunteers, this study finds that active online volunteers are also active offline volunteers, suggesting that volunteering in one sphere can complement volunteering in the other sphere. This study discusses implications for understanding volunteering as a complex activity where individuals engage in varied organizational contexts to different degrees and extend their participation to both online and offline spheres."

2016

"Prioritizing Disaster Mapping Tasks for Online Volunteers Based on Information Value Theory." By Yingjie Hu, Krzysztof Janowicz, and Helen Couclelis.Geographical Analysis, The Ohio State University, 13 October 2016. "In recent years, online volunteers have played important roles in disaster response. After a major disaster, hundreds of volunteers are often remotely convened by humanitarian organizations to map the affected area based on remote sensing images. Typically, the affected area is divided using a grid-based tessellation, and each volunteer can select one grid cell to start mapping. While this approach coordinates the efforts of volunteers, it does not differentiate the priorities of different cells. As a result, volunteers may map grid cells in a random order. Due to the spatial heterogeneity, different cells may contain geographic information that is of different value to emergency responders. Ideally, cells that potentially contain more valuable information should be assigned higher priority for mapping. This article presents an analytical framework for prioritizing the mapping of cells based on the values of information contained in these cells. Our objective is to provide guidance for online volunteers so that potentially more important cells are mapped first. We present a method that is based on information value theory and focus on road networks. We apply this method to a number of simulated scenarios and to a real disaster mapping case from the 2015 Nepal earthquake."

"Episodic volunteering in open source communities." In Proceedings of the 20th International Conference on Evaluation and Assessment in Software Engineering. By Ann Barcomb, published as part of the proceedings of the 20th International Conference on Evaluation and Assessment in Software Engineering, 2016. "Episodic volunteers, who prefer short term engagement to habitual contributions, are present in Free/Libre and Open Source Software (FLOSS) communities. Little is known about how they are viewed within their communities, how they view their communities, how community managers are managing them, or even how many episodic volunteers contribute to FLOSS projects and how much they contribute. Knowing more about the prevalence and management of episodic volunteers in FLOSS will help community managers make better decisions for engaging and utilizing these volunteers. My dissertation addresses these questions, providing a picture of what episodic volunteering looks like in the context of FLOSS communities."

Digital Humanitarians: Citizen journalists on the virtual front line of natural and human-caused disastersby Wendy Norris, College of Media, Communication and Information, University of Colorado Boulder, USA. 16 Sep 2016. "Networks of virtual volunteers act as digital humanitarians who rapidly assemble situational awareness at the onset of natural and human-caused disasters through crowdsourcing, data analysis and crisis mapping to aid on-the-ground emergency response.... This exploratory study contends that the knowledge-based content produced by these groups is citizen journalism akin to data-driven investigative news."

Using Students as a Distributed Coding Team for Validation through Intercoder Agreement. A. Kaufmann, A. Barcomb and D. Riehle. Published by Friedrich-Alexander Universit, Erlangen-Nurnberg, Department of Computer Science, 2016. "We find that intercoder agreement between a large number of students is almost as good as the intercoder agreement between two professionals working on the same materials."

Involvement and Perception of Microvolunteering: published in July 2016. 238 people responded to a survey by Help From Homeover 13 months, through June 2016. The majority of respondents were female. ‘It was easy’, ‘quick’, and ‘on demand’ all scored highly as answers for the question regarding motivation to volunteer for microtasks. 13% of respondents stated they had stopped microvolunteering because they ‘couldn’t find time to do it’, which confirms that even this form of virtual volunteering takes real time, not virtual time. Previous research regarding online micro volunteering can be found below, and at this Help From Home page.

Not So Passive: Engagement and Learning in Volunteer Computing Projects. By Laure Kloetzer, Julien Da Costa and Daniel K. Schneider.//Human Computation///, 2016. "This paper focuses on an unexplored dimension of Citizen Science: the educational potential of Volunteer Computing (VC). VC has been one of the most popular forms of Citizen Science, since its beginnings from 1997, when the first VC platforms, such as SETI@home, were created. Participation in VC is based on volunteers donating their idle computer resources to contribute to large scale scientific research. So far this has often been seen as a rather passive form of participation, compared to other online Citizen Science (or citizen cyberscience) projects, since volunteers are not involved in active data collection, data analysis or project definition. In this paper we present our research conducted in 2013-2014 with the BOINC Community “Alliance Francophone”, and demonstrate that part of the volunteers in Distributed Computing research projects are not passive at all. We show that the dynamism of BOINC hugely relies on community-led gamification and that participation may lead to important learning outcomes on most dimensions of our ILICS (Informal Learning in Citizen Science) model. This includes extending one’s scientific interests, ability to find and engage with people who share similar interests, and offering a range of potential learning outcomes, particularly within the fields of (a) computer and Internet literacy, (b) scientific knowledge and literacy, (c) communication: English and social skills. As demonstrated by our recent ILICS survey research (2015), these latest learning effects happen for all kinds of participants and are even stronger for people who have a lower education background, which is an interesting finding for lifelong education policies. Altogether, VC projects engage volunteers emotionally, far beyond a simple use of their computers’ time and power, and may have an educational value. For a minority of very active volunteers, they become real “Opportunity Spaces”, where they can get new friends, skills and experiences, which they could not have found easily elsewhere in their everyday environment."

Julia Bear of Stony Brook University’s College of Business and Benjamin Collier of Carnegie Mellon University in Qatar published "Where are the Women in Wikipedia? Understanding the Different Psychological Experiences of Men and Women in Wikipedia"in the journal Sex Roles January 2016. "We proposed that masculine norms for behavior in Wikipedia, which may be further exacerbated by the disinhibiting nature of an online, anonymous environment, lead to different psychological experiences for women and men, which, in turn, explain gender differences in contribution behavior. We hypothesized that, among a sample of individuals who occasionally contribute to Wikipedia, women would report less confidence in their expertise, more discomfort with editing others’ work, and more negative responses to critical feedback compared to men, all of which are crucial aspects of contributing to Wikipedia. We also hypothesized that gender differences in these psychological experiences would explain women’s lower contribution rate compared to men in this sample... Significant gender differences were found in confidence in expertise, discomfort with editing, and response to critical feedback. Women reported less confidence in their expertise, expressed greater discomfort with editing (which typically involves conflict) and reported more negative responses to critical feedback compared to men. Mediation analyses revealed that confidence in expertise and discomfort with editing partially mediated the gender difference in number of articles edited, the standard measure for contribution to Wikipedia. Implications for the gender gap in Wikipedia and in organizations more generally are discussed."Their study was summarized in this 02 June 2016 articleWhy Do So Few Women Edit Wikipedia?. Note: Those that edit Wikipedia are called Wikipedians, and they are online volunteers. But relatively few of them are women. The most recent survey of users, in 2011, found just 9% of worldwide contributors to the site were women; in the U.S., it was 15%. In 2015, Jimmy Wales, the founder of the Wikimedia Foundation, which runs the site, said that the organization failed to meet its goal of increasing women’s participation to 25% by 2015, despite launching several initiatives.

2015

Two journal articles look at "serial activists", who are independent online volunteers using their social media channels to support protest movements in other countries: “Serial Activists: Political Twitter Beyond Influentials and the Twittertariat, published in May 2015, andBeing a Serial Activist, published in January 2016, are both by Marco T Bastos of Duke University, USA and Dan Mercea of City University London, UK. In the papers, researchers said they found that these activists don't have huge followers, but that they "bridge disparate language communities and facilitate collective action by virtue of their dedication to multiple causes." The researchers also note that how serial activists differ from "influentials" or traditional grassroots activists. The papers also review the motivations of these volunteers and how they balance their substantial time online with work and family.

Virtual volunteering in social service non-profit organizations: A case study. Mcskimming, Yvonne Rachele. 2015. A Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of Social and Applied Sciences in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Social Sciences, Royal Roads University, Victoria, British Columbia, Canada. Abstract: This case study examined how managers of social service non-profit organizations in the Greater Vancouver area are responding to the emergence of virtual volunteering. The literature indicates virtual volunteering is a relatively new activity with limited research directed towards social service non-profit organizations. Participants involved in the study stated they knew very little about virtual volunteerism, and as a result, were not clear if the approach was one they could adopt or benefit from. Recommendations include further examination of virtual volunteerism and the creation of a common definition for the social service non-profit sector; identification of how the constructs of social presence theory (i.e., authenticity, realness, credibility) can be demonstrated in virtual interactions; the development of an assessment process to analyze the viability and relativity of virtual interactions; and the development of a process and practice designed to capture volunteer meaningfulness in virtual interactions to support quality improvement efforts and volunteer satisfaction

VolEx Research Project: Volunteer Experience in the Digital Age. This is an interdisciplinary research project involving researchers from three UK universities: the School of Management at Royal Holloway University of London, Department of Sociology and the Digital World Research Centre at the University of Surrey, and the Department of People and Organisations at The Open University. "There is a need for both academic and practitioner knowledge in understanding how volunteers are integrating new technologies into their volunteer activities, how third sector organizations are utilising digital tools to support and enhance the practice of volunteering, and what challenges and opportunities are arising as a result. As a consequence, our research seeks to address the issue: How is the practice of volunteering being reconfigured in the digital age?"

Gauging Receptiveness to Social Microvolunteering. This white paper by Erin Brady, Meredith Ringel Morris, and Jeffrey P. Bigham, for Microsoft Research and submitted to the Association for Computing Machinery’s Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2015), defines the term social microvolunteering as "a type of intermediated friendsourcing in which a person can provide access to their friends as potential workers for microtasks supporting causes that they care about. We explore this idea by creating Visual Answers, an exemplar social microvolunteering application for Facebook that posts visual questions from people who are blind. We present results of a survey of 350 participants on the concept of social microvolunteering, and a deployment of the Visual Answers application with 91 participants, which collected 618 high-quality answers to questions asked over 12 days, illustrating the feasibility of the approach." Also "Facebook users responded positively to the suggested application in a survey, and many went on to install the application. Overall, the questions posted to volunteer’s Facebook accounts were answered correctly and quickly, and volunteers reported positive attitudes toward the application after the pilot period was complete, demonstrating the real-world feasibility of our approach."

Human factors in East Asian virtual teamwork: a comparative study of Indonesia, Taiwan and Vietnam. By Ngan Collins, Yu-Min Chou, Malcolm Warner & Chris Rowley. Published in The International Journal of Human Resource Management, Volume 28, 2017 - Issue 10: Human resource management in Asia: Distinctiveness of Asian Human Resource Management. Oct 2015. "There has been considerable research into the technical aspects of virtual teams. By contrast, few studies have focused on their ‘human factors’, such as the way team members cooperate within the context of cross-national boundaries. This study applies a ‘mixed method’ approach to research virtual teams in three Asian economies: Indonesia, Taiwan and Vietnam. We find that critical human factors, including individual cultural intelligence, cultural openness and self-efficacy, significantly influence team member knowledge sharing willingness in cross-national virtual teams. However, a positive relationship between team member knowledge sharing willingness and knowledge sharing behaviour is not supported because other elements, such as interpersonal trust, leadership, team interaction and member language ability, can significantly affect the effect of the above mentioned factors on virtual team knowledge sharing. Our study offers a new model to improve the study of virtual teamwork and provides practical applications for managing cross-national teams, especially in the selection, training and development of team members."

The Platform Affordances and Politics of Digital Microvolunteering, September 2015, by Carla Ilten, Department of Sociology, University of Illinois at Chicago. This study analyzes the organization formerly known as Sparked.

Social microvolunteering: quick, free answers to visual questions from blind people. By Erin Brady, University of Rochester. First presented in June 2015. This dissertation explores VizWiz Social, a mobile phone question asking application for blind users, as a way to examine question routing when using technology to get nearly-realtime answers to visual questions.

Designing a Micro-Volunteering Platform for Situated Crowdsourcing. By Yi-Ching Huang, Graduate Institute of Networking and Multimedia, Taipei City, Taiwan Roc. March 2015. Dissertation research paper presented at the 2015 Computer Supported Cooperative Work & Social Computing conference (CSCW). Investigates "whether micro-volunteering can be applied successfully to a situated crowdsourcing platform for contributing problem-solving efforts with high-quality results."

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. AARP, formerly the American Association of Retired Persons, is a USA-based membership organization for people age 50 and over.

"Virtual Mentoring for Volunteer Leadership Development." Guloy, Sheryl. May 15, 2015. Dissertation, unpublished. Available to download from this URL at the Internet Archive: http://summit.sfu.ca/system/files/iritems1/15491/etd9027_SGuloy.pdf. Abstract: Calls to investigate leadership development in the nonprofit and voluntary sector have been put forth as concerns about leadership succession have increased. To respond to this call to investigate this under-researched area, this design-based, multiple case study provides rich, thick descriptions of the development of the mentoring relationships, between mentor and mentee pairs, over the course of a virtual mentoring program for volunteer leadership development, in a Catholic nonprofit. I explored how participants’ perceptions of their online interactions shaped their experiences and the development of their mentoring relationships while examining the extent to which mentoring contributed to a greater willingness, on the part of mentees, to accept volunteer leadership opportunities. The findings of this study lay the groundwork for future research into virtual mentoring environments for volunteer leadership development.The experiences of seven mentor-mentee case pairs were examined to explore the development of their mentoring relationships. Each pair’s online interactions were observed for six months, from the initial orientation session until the final note was posted. Participants were interviewed two months, four months, and six months into their participation. Data from online communications, weekly logs, and questionnaires were triangulated against mentor and mentee perceptions that emerged within the context of virtual mentoring for volunteer leadership. The compatibility between mentor and mentee expectations, with respect to mentoring approach and mentoring environment, contributed to perceptions about the quality of the mentoring relationship. The CLM was generally perceived by mentees to contribute to leader development, although relationships in which the mentor used a contribution-oriented approach, rather than a guidance-oriented approach, was found to be more complementary to the supports offered by the program. Design considerations include mitigating communication delays and determining whether social media and mobile platforms, which were found to contribute to positive perceptions about the mentoring experience, can forward program goals. The findings have implications for leadership, based on notions of social participation, in which the meaning of willingness to lead shifts from that of formal acceptance of a leadership position to greater participation in leadership activities.

2014

Internet-mediated Volunteering in the EU: Its history, prevalence, and approaches and how it relates to employability and social inclusion, by Jayne Cravens, published in April 2014. 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.

"The media festival volunteer: Connecting online and on-ground fan labor" by Robert Moses Peaslee, Jessica El-Khoury, and Ashley Liles. Texas Tech University, Lubbock, Texas, United States. Published in 2014 inTransformative Works and Cultures(TWC), ISSN 1941-2258. "Online fan labor occurs via interactive media devoted to objects of fan esteem, while on-ground fan labor is best illustrated by the act of volunteering at a media-related festival or event, for example a film festival, a comic con, or a technology expo..." The paper considers fan labor as volunteers because contributors are unpaid, and uses qualitative research data gathered at Fantastic Fest in Austin, Texas, in September 2012 for the paper. "Our data suggest that paying attention to volunteerism—much like paying attention to fan fiction—is crucial for understanding fandom in the context of an increasingly decentralized and user-powered, though not user-owned, media industry, and that consideration of the media festival or fan convention environment is crucial for understanding relationships between the volunteer impulse, social and cultural capital, and power. We conclude that volunteering at Fantastic Fest, and by extension at other media-related festivals, is an ambivalent activity: while it promotes the building of social capital and thus aids a kind of civic engagement, it often simultaneously encourages those communities to provide unpaid, on-ground labor to the industries of which volunteers one day hope to be a part."

Two researchers at Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnbergin Germany,Ann BarcombandDirk Riehle, are working on aproject to understand the concepts, processes, and tools that make open collaborative communities work. A particular goal is the creation of a best practices handbook for managing such communities. "Open source projects, wiki communities, and Wikipedia all share something in common: They are open collaborative communities steeped in technology with typically no single person in charge; in this they are very different from more traditional projects. Our prior analysis showed that these communities follow three core principles: They are egalitarian (everyone may join, no apriori barriers to entry exist), meritocratic (decisions are based on the merits of an argument, not on status), and self-organizing (communities choose their own processes rather than get them dictated)."

Carmit-Noa Shpigelman (2014). Electronic mentoring and media. In D. L. DuBois & M. J. Karcher (Eds.),Handbook of youth mentoring(2nd ed., pp. 259-272). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.

The Virtual Volunteering Wiki The Last Virtual Volunteering Guidebook by Jayne Cravens and Susan Ellis. The book was published January 2014, the wiki is continually updated. The book is the result of several years of research and experience by the authors regarding nonprofit organizations, schools, government agencies and other mission-based organizations using the Internet to support and involve volunteers. It is a practical guide to help organizations start, improve or expand virtual volunteering activities, including micro volunteering, online mentoring and other Internet-mediated volunteering. Whereas the book provides details on suggested practices regarding introducing virtual volunteering to an organization, recruiting online volunteers, screening and training online volunteers, working with online volunteers, evaluating virtual volunteering efforts, creating policies, etc., and includes short case studies to illustrate suggestions in practice, the wiki is a dynamic online resource that is focused on showcasing research on subjects related to virtual volunteering (the page you are reading now) and tech tools that are used or can be used to engage with or support volunteers.

2013

The value of giving a little time: Understanding the potential of micro-volunteering, by Joni Browne, Véronique Jochum, and Jonathan Paylor. November 2013. Published by the Institute for Volunteering Research is an initiative of Volunteering England, and The National Council for Voluntary Organisations (NCVO). Focused on organizations in the United Kingdom. On a related note, by the same authors and published the same year: New ways of giving time: opportunities and challenges in micro-volunteering A literature review.

The ICT4EMPL Future Work project, which included research on Internet-mediated volunteering (virtual volunteering, microvolunteering, etc.) with regards to how it is practised in Europe, how widespread it is in Europe, and any role it does or could play with regard to employability (career exploration, skills development, job connections, job promotion, etc.) and to social inclusion. Its wiki is a knowledge base of resources used to create the final report. This research was undertaken by Jayne Cravens from April - August 2013, for the overall ICT4EMPL Future Work project by: European Commission, Joint Research Centre, Institute for Prospective Technological Studies, Information Society Unit,http://is.jrc.ec.europa.eu.

An architecture for synchronous micro-volunteering in Africa using social media, by L. Butgereit, Meraka Institute, Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University, South Africa, and R. A. Botha. Presented at 2013 IEEE International Conference Pervasive Computing and Communications Workshops (PERCOM). "There are many successful examples of Virtual Volunteering such as the Gutenberg project and the Librivox project. However, in both these cases, a volunteer must donate a substantial amount of his or her time in activities such as reading books or proofreading books. This paper examines the concept of synchronous micro-volunteering where potential volunteers can effectively donate as little as 10 minutes of their time and immediately assist other people. The paper then describes the architecture which supports synchronous micro-volunteering."

“Welcome !” Social and Psychological Predictors of Volunteer Socializers in Online Communities. CSCW’13, February 23–27, 2013, San Antonio, Texas, USA. 2013 ACM 978-1-4503-1331-5/13/02. by Gary Hsieh, Youyang Hou and Ian Chen, Communication Arts and Sciences, Department of Psychology, Michigan State University and Khai N. Truong, Department of Computer Science, University of Toronto. Abstract: Volunteer socializers are members of a community who voluntarily help newcomers become familiar with the popular practices and attitudes of the community. In this paper, we explore the social and psychological predictors of volunteer socializers on reddit, an online social newssharing community. Through a survey of over 1000 Reddit users, we found that social identity, prosocial-orientation and generalized reciprocity are all predictors of socializers in the community. Interestingly, a user’s tenure with the online community has a quadratic effect on volunteer socialization behaviors—new and long-time members are both more likely to help newcomers than those in between. We conclude with design implications for motivating users to help newcomers.

Working and sustaining the virtual "Disaster Desk". Authors: Kate Starbird and Leysia Palen. CSCW '13: Proceedings of the 2013 conference on Computer supported cooperative work, February 2013, Pages 491–502. Abstract: Humanity Road is a volunteer organization working within the domain of disaster response. The organization is entirely virtual, relying on ICT to both organize and execute its work of helping to inform the public on how to survive after disaster events. This paper follows the trajectory of Humanity Road from an emergent group to a formal non-profit, considering how its articulation, conduct and products of work together express its identity and purpose, which include aspirations of relating to and changing the larger ecosystem of emergency response. Through excerpts of its communications, we consider how the organization makes changes in order to sustain itself in rapid-response work supported in large part by episodic influxes of volunteers. This case enlightens discussion about technology-supported civic participation, and the means by which dedicated long-term commitment to the civic sphere is mobilized.

"Delivering patients to sacré coeur: collective intelligence in digital volunteer communities." Author: Kate Starbird. CHI '13: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing SystemsApril 2013 Pages 801–810. Abstract: This study examines the information-processing activities of digital volunteers and other connected ICT users in the wake of crisis events. Synthesizing findings from several previous research studies of digital volunteerism, this paper offers a new approach for conceptualizing the activities of digital volunteers, shifting from a focus on organizing to a focus on information movement. Using the lens of distributed cognition, this research describes collective intelligence as transformations of information within a system where cognition is distributed socially across individuals as well as through their tools and resources. This paper demonstrates how digital volunteers, through activities such as relaying, amplifying, verifying, and structuring information, function as a collectively intelligent cognitive system in the wake of disaster events.

2012

The results ofa global survey regarding software used for volunteer management(in PDF) from 2012, by Rob Jackson and Jayne Cravens, which revealed how widespread Internet-mediated volunteering, episodic volunteering, and other volunteering that did not require long-term commitment or onsite-only involvement is among a variety of organizations worldwide. This blog,What do volunteers do? The answer may surprise you, summarizes these results.

Micro-volunteering: doing some good through smartphones? Johnathan Paylor (2012 June). Institute for Volunteering Research. A report on a survey of people who used the smartphone app Do Some Good, available through the telecommunications company Orange, conducted from June 2011 until December 2011. 3,598 people completed the survey. Participants were largely from the U.K.. 56% were female, and 78% between 16 and 34. However, the survey did not explore what motivated volunteers to choose tasks or organisations to support (only their motivation for using the app and being interested in microvolunteering) and the report does not note what kinds of tasks volunteers undertook. Also, the survey did not explore the perspectives of the organisations that recruited online volunteers using the app, and this restricts what can be said about the impact of the volunteers’ actions beyond benefits for themselves.

Prosocial behaviors in the cyber context. January 2012. Michelle F. Wright and Yan Li, Department of Psychology, DePaul University. Prosocial behaviors are defined as purposeful and voluntary acts directed toward other people or society as a whole and may include such behaviors as helping, sharing, donating, and volunteering. Prosocial behaviors in the cyber context can take various forms, including donating time and attention to electronic discussion boards or technical support groups, helping among employees at the corporate level, voluntarily helping players in computer games, online mentoring, sharing open source software, virtual voluntarism, and making charitable donations to organizations online. "Not only is the internet being used for charitable donations, it is also a ripe environment for virtual voluntarism. One of the first investigations to examine virtual voluntarism (i.e., voluntarism completed in whole or in part through the internet or other internet connected devices), the Virtual Volunteering Project, assessed the first-hand experiences of almost 200 agencies involving online volunteers." The list of references in this paper are a good place to further research online behavior as it relates to positive actions online, which very often are not called "virtual volunteering" (but should be).

Virtual Volunteering and Digital Engagement: A Qualitative Investigation. Volunteering Queensland (Australia) "conducted in-depth interviews with five diverse organisations, took a close look at the practice of three organisations in the form of case studies, and undertook a crowdsourcing experiment on Twitter." The findings are presented, followed by "a discussion of their significance for policy and practice." This research was authored by James Schier, Erin Gregor and Sarah McAtamney and supervised by Mark Creyton. January 2012.

Social media use for news and individuals' social capital, civic engagement and political participation. 01 April 2012. Gil de Zúñiga, H.Jung, N., & Valenzuela, S.

"Microvolunteering survey. Snapshot overview of microvolunteering participants", published in 2012, by Help From Home and Mike Bright.

2011

"Social Capital, Social Networks, and the Social Web; The Case of Virtual Volunteering," by Dhrubodhi Mukherjee, Southern Illinois University, USA, from the book Virtual Communities: Concepts, Methodologies, Tools and Applications., published in 2011. Abstract: Social interaction technologies create communicative possibilities that go beyond dyadic interactions and across physical boundaries, bringing a qualitative shift in the functioning of the Internet. The present chapter employs social capital and social networks perspectives to identify the social determinants of virtual volunteering in the age of Web 2.0, explores the social motivation of volunteers who perform tasks using the Social Web in the context of online volunteering, and addresses the dynamic interplay of social capital, social networks, and the Social Web with implications for virtual volunteering. The argument furthered is that active participation in social networks generates social capital and facilitates the development of the Social Web.

Management von Online-Volunteers: ein Handbuch, by Hannes Jähnert und Lisa Dittrich unter Mitarbeit von Thomas Kegel, Academie für Ehrenamtlichkeit Deutschland, Berlin 2011.

"Participation of Older Adults in Virtual Volunteering: A Qualitative Analysis." by Dhrubodhi Mukherjee. 2011. Published in Ageing International. "This study takes the initiative to generate new knowledge on how the Internet can play an active role in facilitating volunteerism among older people. It explores the demographic characteristics, motivation, and types of tasks performed by older adults while volunteering in a virtual environment. Given the emerging support infrastructure to facilitate virtual volunteering among older adults, this study sought to better comprehend the profiles and motivations of older virtual volunteers. In particular, the study wishes to understand if parallels could be drawn between on-site volunteering and online volunteering among older adults. Correspondingly, the study also explores whether participation in virtual volunteering by older adults increased their sense of belonging."

"Is virtual volunteering beneficial or challenging to an organisation and its volunteers?" by Mohammed A Abdullahi. Masters thesis for Coventry University, UK. 2011. Abstract: Volunteering research has continued to grasp the attention of many researchers in recent years (Wilson and Musick 1997; Harris 2000; Starnes 2004). This is due to the importance of volunteering to the lives of people and the society’s at large (Little 1999; Primavera 1999; McClintock 2002; Susan et al 2011). However, virtual volunteering which is an emerging aspect of volunteering has significantly been under researched (Pena-Lopez 2007), despite the existence of this type of volunteering for over a decade (Cravens 2006). The researches that exist on virtual volunteering are based on assumptions or borrow from the literature of home working, telecommuting or virtual organisation (Adveco 2005, Sauder 2011). There is a clear lack of scholarly research into virtual volunteering (Pena-Lopez 2007). Thus, this study is one of the few studies on virtual volunteering which has conducted empirical primary research in the UK. In this study, the benefits and challenges of virtual volunteering were explored, using a dual perspective (organisational and virtual volunteers perspectives). Virtual volunteering, was identified to have benefits such as greater coverage of volunteers, fits into volunteers personal commitments (due to its flexibilities), and encourages the development of social capital and employability skills amongst other benefits. Virtual volunteering was identified to have challenges such as volunteer management, volunteer isolation, miscommunication between the virtual volunteers and their organisation amongst other challenges. The study compared and contrasted the views of the virtual volunteers and their organisation as to the benefits and challenges of virtual volunteering.

"Volunteering for Research: A Test of the Psychometric Properties of the Volunteer Functions Inventory with Online Panellists."International Journal of Public Opinion Research, July 2011. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The World Association for Public Opinion Research. By Andrea Vocino and Michael J. Polonsky, Deakin University, School of Management and Marketing, Burwood, Victoria, Australia.

"Itragroup Structuring and Interpersonal Perception in Real Contact and Virtual Volunteer Groups." by Kondratyev M.Yu, Doctor of Psychology, Corresponding Member, Russian Academy of Education, Moscow, Russia and Lyubimova O.A., educational psychologist, Department of Methodical Support for the Educational Psychology Service, Moscow State University of Psychology and Education, Moscow, Russia. Social Psychology and Society, 2011. Vol. 2, no. 4, 71–86, ISSN: 2221-1527 / 2311-7052 (online). The article presents results of a study on the itragroup structuring and interpersonal perception in three types of groups that differ by the degree of virtuality: 1) really functioning groups of volunteers, 2) relatively virtual groups of volunteers and 3) maximally virtual groups of volunteers. The results indicate that the degree of virtuality of these communities determines both the nature of informal itragroup structure and peer assessment features in such groups. Another important result of the study demonstrated that in the continuum of “a real, functioning contact group — a maximally virtual group” a significant “middle” position in terms of socio-psychological content is occupied by the relatively virtual groups. Additionally, it was shown that the degree of virtuality of pro-socially oriented volunteer groups to a great extent determines the characteristics of their unity.

"Voluntweeters": self-organizing by digital volunteers in times of crisis. By Kate Starbird and Leysia Palen. CHI '11: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. May 2011 Pages 1071–1080. Abstract: This empirical study of "digital volunteers" in the aftermath of the January 12, 2010 Haiti earthquake describes their behaviors and mechanisms of self-organizing in the information space of a microblogging environment, where collaborators were newly found and distributed across continents. The paper explores the motivations, resources, activities and products of digital volunteers. It describes how seemingly small features of the technical environment offered structure for self-organizing, while considering how the social-technical milieu enabled individual capacities and collective action. Using social theory about self-organizing, the research offers insight about features of coordination within a setting of massive interaction.

2010

"The ‘popular’ culture of internet activism." December 2010. By Tatiana Tatarchevskiy, University of Virginia, USA. Published in New Media & Society. How does the internet contribute to changes in civic engagement in the USA? To answer this question we must examine the institutional context of US marketizing civil society and the cultures of good citizenship constructed online. Drawing upon the findings from a case study of ONE, a campaign targeting extreme poverty and the spread of AIDS, I demonstrate how the internet may function as a space of new divisions of labor between civil society organizational actors and lay activists. While organizational actors use Web 2.0 to make activism convenient and standardized, the public is asked to participate in what I term ‘visual labor’, creating and representing images of community online that legitimize the organization’s claims. At the same time, volunteer action is understood largely as performative. Ultimately, the article confronts the understanding of the internet as a post-bureaucratic democracy and emphasizes its cultural role in communicative capitalism.

"‘Volunteering is like any other business’: Civic participation and social media." September 2010. By Anne Kaun Södertörn, University Sweden, and Julie Uldam, Roskilde University, Denmark. Published in New Media & Society. "The increased influx of refugees in 2015 has led to challenges in transition and destination countries such as Germany, Sweden and Denmark. Volunteer-led initiatives providing urgent relief played a crucial role in meeting the needs of arriving refugees. The work of the volunteers in central stations and transition shelters was mainly organised with the help of Facebook, in terms of both inward and outward communications. This article examines the role of social media for civic participation drawing on Swedish volunteer initiatives that emerged in the context of the migration crisis in 2015 as a case study. Theoretically, this article provides an analytical framework, including power relations, technological affordances, practices and discourses, which helps shed light on the interrelation between social media and civic participation."

Wikipedia Survey – Overview of Results, by Ruediger Glott, Philipp Schmidt and Rishab Ghosh. Published in March 2010. In a survey of contributors to all Wikipedia sites (22 language editions in 231 countries) by UNU-MERIT, a joint research and training centre of United Nations University (UNU) and Maastricht University, in cooperation with the Wikimedia Foundation, the largest share of responses was provided by users who accessed the survey via the Russian or English Wikipedia sites, followed by users of the German and Spanish versions. Contributors were split into four approximately equal age-groups: those under 18, those between 18 and 22, those from 22 to 30 and the remainder between 30 and 85. About 23% of contributors had completed degree-level education, 26% were undergraduates and 45% had secondary education or less. 87% of respondents were men and 13% were women. Download from http://www.wikipediastudy.org

"An exploratory study of older adults' engagement with virtual volunteerism."Dhrubodhi Mukherjee. 2010. Published in Journal of Technology in Human Services. Interviews done with volunteers through SeniorNet. "Implications of this study include reconceptualization of virtual volunteering as a strategic tool to recruit older adults and greater usage of information communication technologies to promote civic engagement among older people and, thus, positively influence their health and well-being."

"Volunteered Geographic Information and Crowdsourcing Disaster Relief: A Case Study of the Haitian Earthquake," by Matthew Zook, University of Kentucky, Mark Graham, University of Oxford, Taylor Shelton, University of Kentucky, Sean Gorman, FortiusOne. FromWorld Medical & Health Policy, Vol. 2: Iss. 2, Article 2, published in 2010. Abstract: This paper outlines the ways in which information technologies (ITs) were used in the Haiti relief effort, especially with respect to web-based mapping services. Although there were numerous ways in which this took place, this paper focuses on four in particular: CrisisCamp Haiti, OpenStreetMap, Ushahidi, and GeoCommons. This analysis demonstrates that ITs were a key means through which individuals could make a tangible difference in the work of relief and aid agencies without actually being physically present in Haiti. While not without problems, this effort nevertheless represents a remarkable example of the power and crowdsourced online mapping and the potential for new avenues of interaction between physically distant places that vary tremendously.

2009

America Online volunteers : Lessons from an early co-production community, byHector Postigo, in the International Journal of Cultural Studies 2009. This article continues previous work that analysed the case of America Online (AOL) volunteers from critical perspectives of immaterial and free labor, and incorporates newly acquired documents and interviews by the United States Department of Labor (DOL) with volunteers. Specifically, this article puts forth the AOL volunteers’ case as an instance of co-production that eventually met its demise when organizational changes resulted in the rise of a labor consciousness among some volunteers that made the ongoing relationship impossible. This article shows the types of co-productive labor that took place during the height of the AOL/volunteer relationship and the structures put in place to help AOL harness the power of a free distributed workforce. The research posits that the success of the co-productive relationship was a function of a balance between a numbers of elements: (1) the perceived reasonable compensation on the part of volunteers, (2) social factors and attitudes towards work such as a sense of community, creativity, and (3) a sense of accomplishment.

E-Mentoring for All, by Carmit-Noa Shpigelman, Patrice L. (Tamar) Weiss, Shunit Reiter. Department of Special Education, Faculty of Education, University of Haifa, Mount Carmel, Haifa 31905, Israel and Department of Occupational Therapy, Faculty of Social Welfare & Health Sciences, University of Haifa, Israel. This paper presents the results of a study that evaluated an electronic mentoring intervention program designed to provide social and emotional support for protégés with disabilities by mentors who also have disabilities. Using a primarily qualitative research design, the study characterized the electronic mentoring process and its contributions to this population. The findings provided support for the potential of electronic mentoring for personal development and empowerment of youth with special needs. Furthermore, the findings supported the usability and utility of the e-mentoring intervention based on a conceptual framework that characterized an electronic support process for people with special needs. Implications for implementing feasible electronic mentoring programs are discussed. Computers in Human Behavior. 01/2009

Carmit-Noa Shpigelman, Reiter, S., & Weiss, P. L. (2009a). A conceptual framework for electronic socio-emotional support for people with special needs.International Journal of Rehabilitation Research, 32, 301-308. doi: 10.1097/MRR.0b013e32831e4519

2008

“Das Social Web ist für NGOs ein Empowerment-Instrument” - Interview mit Brigitte Reiser-Brigitte Reiserberät Nichtregierungsorganisationen, wie sie sinnvollerweise Social-Web-Techniken einsetzen können. Hierfür betreibt sie zwei Websites, “Soziales Kapital für gemeinnützige Organisationen” und “Web 2.0 für gemeinnützige Organisationen”, sowie ein Blog “zu Stakeholder-Management und Web 2.0″. Nov. 18, 2008.

Quando a ajuda chega por mail: o voluntariado online como oportunidade e realidade by Alcides A. Monteiro, Doutor em Sociologia, Universidade da Beira Interior (UBI). "Escassamente (re)conhecido em Portugal, o voluntariado online (ou voluntariado virtual) é hoje uma opção já seguida por muitas organizações da sociedade civil, encarado não só como forma de cooptar novos voluntários (jovens, reformados, profissionais e pais de família), mas também de satisfazer necessidades emergentes no seio dessas organizações (nos domínios da tradução, da assessoria, do desenho de projectos ou do e-learning). Distingue-se num tal panorama, não só pela credibilidade da organização mas também pela sua abrangência, a iniciativa de voluntariado online desenvolvida pelas Nações Unidas e a partir da qual se estabelece uma definição 'oficial' para esta nova dimensão do voluntariado: 'tarefas completadas, no seu todo ou em parte, via Internet a partir de casa, do trabalho, da universidade, de um cibercafé ou telecentro'. À luz das experiências já desenvolvidas um pouco por todo o mundo e documentadas online, o presente texto visa enunciar as condições de adopção de projectos de idêntica natureza por parte das organizações do Terceiro Sector em Portugal, a partir das oportunidades e constrangimentos que rodeiam o voluntariado online." Vi Congresso Português de Sociologia. Mudons Socias: Saberes e Prácticas. Universidade Nova de Lisboa. Faculdade de Ciências Socias E Humanas. 25 - 28 June 2008.

"Potential and promise of online volunteering" by Yair Amichai-Hamburger, Bezeq International Research Center for Internet Psychology, Sammy Ofer School of Communications, Interdisciplinary Center, Israel. 2008. Published in Computers in Human Behavior24(2). "Advocates a model to explain the potential and promise of online volunteerism from the perspective of the volunteer." Primarily anecdotal information and hypothesis.

2007

Why Do People Write Free Documentation? Results of a Survey, published in June 2007, by Andy Oram. "A unique survey ran on O'Reilly's web site during the first three months of 2007, aimed at people who contribute free documentation to online mailing lists, web sites, and other forums. The survey garnered 354 responses, which in itself indicates the thriving state of free documentation and the dedication of the people who write it… Thousands edit wikis, answer questions on forums, and blog about experiments with technology--mostly for free. Their contributions may go on sites that are advertising-supported, but they rarely share in the revenue. Some receive fees elsewhere for articles and books, but the writing done gratis often comes up in search engines at rankings equal to or higher than official corporate sites such as Sun Microsystems' Java documentation."

"Online Volunteers: Knowledge Managers in Nonprofits," by Ismael Peña-López. Published inThe Journal of Information Technology in Social Change, Spring Edition - April 2007. Analyzed 17 web sites devoted to fostering volunteering to find out (a) if there was a broadly accepted definition of the concept of online volunteering and (b) if there was a list of tasks thus designed as the core or ideal competencies of online volunteers.

"Voluntary Engagement in an Open web-based Encyclopedia : Wikipedians, and Why They Do It" by Joachim Schroer, Guido Hertel, University of Würzburg, 8 January 2007. Available fromtexte intégral en ligne

"What Motivates Wikipedians?" by Oded Nov. Printed in the Communications of the ACM in November 2007. Association for Computing Machinery. Available from http://faculty.poly.edu/~onov/Nov_Wikipedia_motivations. This study focused on online volunteers who contribute information to the English version of Wikipedia on an ongoing basis: people who had created a user page on the site, in addition to contributing information to other pages, were asked to complete a web-based survey. 151 people responded. On average, respondents have been contributing content to Wikipedia 2.3 years, and the average level of contribution was 8.27 hours per week. Overall, the top motivations for their continued volunteering online for Wikipedia were "fun" (volunteering as an opportunity to undertake an enjoyable activity) and "ideology" (a passion for the mission of the organization). Motivations related to meeting and engaging with friends online or related to career exploration or skills development were not found to be strong motivations for contribution.

Hacia una cooperación en red: el caso del voluntariado virtual. By Carlos E. Jiménez Gómez. 2007. ABSTRACT: Son muchos los ámbitos en los que se ha puesto de manifiesto la utilidad de lasTIC. Esta comunicación aborda uno de ellos, la cooperación al desarrollo, haciendoreferencia, en concreto, a las potencialidades del trabajo en red que el interesanteconcepto de voluntariado virtual presenta. Para ello, en primer lugar, se profundiza en elsignificado de dicho término para, a continuación, analizar algunos de los factores mássignificativos a la hora de diseñar e implantar iniciativas de voluntariado virtual (a saber,infraestructura, gestión del capital humano, habilidades de dirección, planificación ygestión de proyectos y cultura tecnológica). Se termina con la presentación de dos casosexitosos que subrayan la importancia de las variables presentadas.

Before 2007

"Online mentoring: the promise and challenges of an emerging approach to youth development." by Rhodes JE1, Spencer R, Saito RN, Sipe CL. Lead by MENTOR/National Mentoring Partnership with America Online, People magazine, PowerUP and the Waitt Family Foundation, this online mentoring program, the Digital Heroes Campaign (DHC), brought together 242 youth with online mentors over a two-year period, beginning in 2000. Survey, focus group, and interview data, in addition to analyses of the e-mails that pairs exchanged, were examined in order to assess the nature, types, and quality of the relationships that were formed. Despite youths' generally positive self-reports, deep connections between mentors and mentees appeared to be relatively rare. The findings suggest that online mentoring programs face significant challenges and that further research is needed to determine under what conditions online mentoring is likely to be most effective. The Journal of Primary Prevention. 2006 Sep;27(5):497-513. Available for purchase fromSpringer, or through a university or library access from a database such as throughProQuest.

"Involving International Online Volunteers: Factors for Success, Organizational Benefits, and New Views of Community," by Jayne Cravens, MSc. In conjunction with theInstitute for Volunteering Research's November 2005 conference, "Volunteering Research: Frontiers and Horizons," this research, the first done regarding Online Volunteering in quite a while, was undertaken to assess current common practices among organizations successfully involving international online volunteers; to explore the role online volunteering may play in building a more cohesive global community; and to assess the relationship between involving online volunteers and building organizational capacities. This paper offers a brief history and overview of online volunteering practice and details survey results regarding organizations that involved the Outstanding Online Volunteers of 2002, 2003, 2004, and 2005 at www.onlinevolunteering.org. This paper was published inThe International Journal of Volunteer Administration (IJOVA) in July 2006.

“El impacto positivo de las Tecnologías de la Información en la acción voluntaria: el voluntariado online. Aspectos destacados y análisis prospectivo” by Carlos E. Jimenez, 1 de Diciembre de 2005. Documento de difusión de ponencias y comunicaciones del 8º Congreso Estatal del Voluntariado, p. 7. 8º Congreso Estatal del Voluntariado, Granada, España.

“Good Medicine: Better Health by Volunteering Online” by Dr. Natalie Hruska, 2006. Volunteer activity among different age groups is compared. A discussion on the relationship between altruism and individual well-being follows. Then, the contributions of volunteer activity to social capital are explored. On-site volunteer activity is compared and contrasted with online volunteer activity. Finally, individual motives for volunteer activity are identified, as well as how these motives are best served in a volunteer program.

“Informal Communication in an Online Volunteer Community: Implications for Supporting Virtual Relationships." Susan R. Fussell and Leslie D. Setlock, Human-computer Interaction Institute, Carnegie Mellon University, USA. March 13, 2003. Abstract. This paper considers the ways in which proximity benefits informal communication and relationship development and how technologies can create virtual proximity. We present an “encounters” framework for understanding how proximity shapes opportunities for interpersonal communication and relationship development and then examine how dimensions of encounters influence informal communication in an online chatroom-based volunteer community. The results suggest that many of the dimensions of encounters we propose influenced informal communication and relationship development among members of the community. The results further suggest that the ability to experience sounds and images simultaneously, through shared web pages, files, and other devices, was important for relationship-building. We conclude with a discussion of areas for future research, including enhancing the encounters framework, understanding how affordances of media shape interpersonal encounters, extending the work to other online communities, and the development of new research paradigms.

From Traditional to Virtual Mentoring. Kirk, James J.; Olinger, Jennifer. 2003-Jan-6. Abstract: The tradition of a mentoring relationship is embedded in a personal/business relationship between a wise teacher and someone who needs to learn a trade. Learning sessions have occurred over the years in many types of settings, including one-on-one mentoring, conferences, meetings, telephone, and fax. As society looks to technology as a vital resource in everyday life, virtual mentoring has emerged. Traditional mentoring is face-to-face communication and synchronous; time and location of mentoring can be an issue; it is all personal touch and communication, can be expensive, and is not recorded so it can be confidential. Virtual mentoring is communication via computer and asynchronous; time and location are not issues; there is no personal touch or communication, can be inexpensive, and is recorded so it cannot be confidential. Well-established virtual mentoring programs for adults can offer a starting point for individuals and organizations seeking virtual mentoring opportunities and information. Examples are HighTech Women; Ask the Employer.com; Nursing Net; Intel Corporation; Piver and Associates Civil Engineering Firm; CanadaInfoNet; Mentors in American Philanthropy; MentorNet; General Electric; Smart Mentoring Group; MIT; C.E.O. Mentor; Lincoln Financial Group; The Virtual Volunteering Project; and WEPAN. (Contains 33 references)

"Virtual Volunteering: Current Status and Future Prospects", by Yvonne Harrison and Vic Murray, published in Emerging Areas of Volunteering by ARNOVA in 2005. Other articles by these authors include a chapter, "Bridging the Effectiveness Divide: The Case of Online Recruitment in Canada," in the bookNonprofits and Technology: Emerging Research for Usable Knowledge, edited by Cortes and Rafter, 2007; a summary of the research carried out by Harrison, Murray and Jim MacGregor on the impact of information and communications technology on the management of Canadian volunteer programs, featured inThe Canadian Journal of Volunteer Resources ManagementVol. 12, No. 2, 2004; "Information and Communications Technology: Navigating Technological Change and Changing Relationships in Volunteer Administration," the lead article in theJournal of Volunteer Administration, Vol. 22, No. 3, 2004; "The Use and Effectiveness of Information and Communications Technology in the Management of Volunteer Programs", (2004); "The Impact of ICT on the Management of Canadian Volunteer Programs: Information and Communications Technology: Beyond Anecdotes, (2004); "Virtual Volunteering in Canada Fact Sheet 2002"; "The Impact of Information and Communications Technology on Volunteer Management" (2002); and "Virtual Volunteering: Current Status and Future Prospects", regarding online volunteering in Canada (2002).

Power to the Edges: Trends and Opportunities in Online Civic Engagement- Final Edition 1.0 - May 6, 2005, by Jillaine Smith, Martin Kearns and Allison Fine. This paper explores trends and strategies related to the current (as of May 2005) and future state of online activism, fundraising, and democracy. It draws on a review of articles, studies, online discussions, and interviews with 19 leaders in the fields of online technologies, nonprofit capacity building, citizen engagement and social networks. By civic engagement, the authors mean "activities by which people participate in civic, community and political life and by doing so express their commitment to community." The authors stress that "online engagement does not preclude, exclude or even dilute the need for "on land" (or offline) engagement such as house parties and door-to-door canvassing. Rather...traditional forms of engaging citizens remain the most effective for connecting and organizing. The relationship between online and offline citizen engagement requires a constant flow back and forth that balances the need for scale with the need for the intensity and personal connection that comes from in-person gatherings and activities." Authors also note that: "New models of civic engagement require a different set of benchmarks, skills and training. In fact, the changes have very little to do with technology or the Internet and everything to do with building entirely new organizational cultures." The report concludes with a series of findings and recommendations of the ways that organizations, individuals, and philanthropic groups can help build such cultures. This 43-page paper was commissioned by the USA-based Philanthropy for Active Civic Engagement (PACE).

Lessons from onlinevolunteering.org, 2001 - 2005. A compilation of material from the UN's Online Volunteering service, formerly a part of NetAid, from 2001 - 2005. The resources including testimonials from host organizations and online volunteers from 2002 to 2005, an article providing user statistics as of April 2004, case studies about online volunteering projects, and support materials for the OV service.

Leading and motivating virtual teams in volunteer organizations, by Andrew Wong. 2004. In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Science in Management Graduate Management Program The Center for Creative Change Antioch University Seattle. This paper is an inquiry into the challenges associated with leading and motivating virtual teams in volunteer organizations: challenges in communication due to distance, time, and cultural diversity, and challenges in technology due to technical abilities, equipment costs, and meeting base technology requirements. Following a review of how these challenges should be considered, the author concludes that the traditional approach in leadership when combined with the special considerations that are required to lead virtual teams will produce effective virtual teams that can maintain their effectiveness through to the end of their purpose.

Why open source software can succeed. Bonaccorsi, A., & Rossi, C. (2003). 1243–1258. This paper finds that open source software, developed mostly by volunteers (unpaid), is often of superior quality to the software developed by one of the most powerful companies in the history of the world employing unquestionably extremely intelligent people. The focus of this paper is on three key economic problems raised by the emergence of Open Source: motivation, co-ordination, and diffusion.

Free/Libre and Open Source Software: Survey and Study FLOSS, Deliverable D18: FINAL REPORT Part IV: Survey of Developers. By Rishab Aiyer Ghosh, Ruediger Glott, Bernhard Krieger, Gregorio Robles, Published in June 2002 by the International Institute of Infonomics, University of Maastricht and Berlecon Research GmbH, The Netherlands. The survey and study included several questions about the motivations of unpaid contributors to contribute to FLOSS projects. According to the study, more than 78% of 2,784 FLOSS survey respondents indicated that the reason why they volunteered for FLOSS projects was to “learn and develop new skills”. The second most popular reason was to “share my knowledge and skills” (49.8%), followed by the motivation to “participate in a new form of cooperation” (34.5%). In answer to the question about why they continue to be involved in FS/OS development, the percentage of respondents who cited the desire to “share my knowledge and skills” increased to 67.2%. The motive to “learn and develop new skills” was still the most prevalent (70.5%), followed by the desire to “improve FS/OS products of other developers” (39.8%) and “participate in a new form of cooperation” (37.2%). Available from http://www.flossproject.org/report/Final4.htm

"Social Movement Participation in the Digital Age: Predicting Offline and Online Collective Action," by Suzanne Brunsting and Tom Postmes. Published inSmall Group Research, vol. 33, issue 5, October 2002 "Motives to participate in online versus offline collective action were investigated among environmental activists in the Netherlands... This research gives an empirical insight in the influence of Internet on motives for collective action and on the participation of peripheral members."

Handheld computer technologies in community service/volunteering/advocacy: This was a pioneering article, published in October 2001 and researched and written by Jayne Cravens. It provides early examples of volunteers/citizens/grass roots advocates using handheld computers, then called personal digital assistants (PDAs), or cell phones (pre-smart phones) as part of community service/volunteering/advocacy, or examples that could be applied to volunteer settings. It was part of the United Nations Information Technology Service (UNITeS) online knowledge base.

Technology-Assisted Delivery of School Based Mental Health Services: Defining School Social Work for the 21st Century, which was co-published simultaneously as the Journal of Technology in Human Services, Volume 21, Numbers 1/2 2003, by The Haworth Press, featured a paper byJayne Cravens, Online Mentoring: Programs and Suggested Practices as of February 2001.

Human Services Online: A New Arena for Service Delivery, which was co-published simultaneously as the Journal of Technology in Human Services, Volume 17, Numbers 1 and 2/3 2000, by The Haworth Press, featured a paper by Jayne Cravens, "Virtual Volunteering: Online Volunteers Providing Assistance to Human Service Agencies."

The Virtual Volunteering Project, based at the University of Texas at Austin and directed by Jayne Cravens. The project ended in January 2001. The information on this VV Project site came from research of and work with hundreds of nonprofit organizations in the USA, as well as some charities and NGOs outside the USA. The Project also did a few small, informal studies regarding online volunteering among different services and their users in 1997, 1998 & 1999. You can view an archived version of the site, on its end date in 2001, here. You can view archived versions of the site from earlier years by searching for www.serviceleader.org at the Internet Wayback Machine. You can view the very earliest version of the site, from 1997, by searching for www.impactonline.org/vv/ at at the Internet Wayback Machine.

Guía del Voluntariado Virtualde Susan Ellis y Jayne Cravens (traducida por los miembros de E-Voluntas). Published in 2002, based on the English book published in 2000. Original web site was herehttp://www.sumadevoluntades.org/summa/evoluntas/index.jspbut this site is no longer affiliated with E-Voluntas. The material can be retrieved by cutting and pasting that original web site address intoarchive.org, and looking at the archive for May 2003. The direct link on archive.org (which doesn't always work).

The Virtual Volunteering Guidebook, by Susan Ellis and Jayne Cravens. Published in 2000, based on the Virtual Volunteering Project (see above). Also translated into Spanish (see above). Rewritten and published as The Last Virtual Volunteering Guidebook (2014).

How Open Source Software Works: "Free" User-to-User Assistance?, Eric von Hippel, Karim Lakhani, MIT, Sloan School of Management, Sloan Working Paper 4117-00, eBusiness@MIT Working Paper 132, May 2000. Unpaid contributors to open source projects are rarely called volunteers - this is usually called distributed engagement. Yet, they have much in common with what we think of traditionally as online volunteers, and the way these unpaid contributors are constantly motivated and continually involved across development levels is definitely something from which nonprofits could learn.

Why telecollaborative projects sometimes fail (PDF). A short case study by Dr. Judi Harris, then of the University of Texas at Austin, regarding the pioneering Electronic Emissary initiative, a curriculum-based online tutoring program for high school students. From Learning & Leading with Technology, Volume 27 Number 5, 2000, International Society for Technology in Education.

Surveys of Volunteers and Agencies regarding Virtual Volunteering, 1997 - 2000. By Jayne Cravens. Summaries of the data for each year are presented, as are the raw data itself. Published by the Virtual Volunteering Project, part of the University of Texas at Austin.

The Telementoring Revolution: Three Case Studies. By Felicia R. Robb, Harvard Graduate, School of Education, Prof. Martha Wiske Interactive Distance Education, T-524, May 9, 1997.

Knowing when this resource is updated