Wow, this is an energizing article. It says that there are 100K New Yorkers who have made themselves available for volunteering. This is a tremendous opportunity. NYC: Call Us!
Oversupply of volutneers and lack of management capacity has been a long-time bane of volunteering programs. It's because traditional volunteering has a lot of overhead: training, vetting, management, and evaluation. It simply takes a lot of work to run a traditional volunteer program.
One solution is crowdsourcing. And the article says as much, suggesting crowdsourcing of the type that Obama has been practicing recently - it's the "idea generation" form. It goes like this:
We have a problem. Have a solution? Send it in via a Web form. Then vote on all of the ideas. The cream will rise to the top.
This is cool, but it's only one kind of crowdsourcing - and in the end, you have big pile of ideas and then a hellova lot of work remaining.
Enter: Crowdsourcing that gets work done.
Tag, photograph, and geolocate problems with city infrastructure. Transmit your GPS location during your commute to work to develop great GIS data. Photograph, tag, and identify urban birds. Translate documents into other languages. Help a non-English speaker navigate a city service via a 3-way call. Rate and review work by other volutneers... building a reputation system into the crowdsourced work - so that volunteers are doing the management of other volunteers.
This is what we're working on at The Extraordinaries. We can make it happen for 100K volunteers (at least those with smartphones or Web connectivity) in NYC. Please call Jacob @ (773) 742-5515 or Ben at (415)-577-5675
-ben
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