Online volunteering

I recently posted this on The Internet Wishlist,

I wish there was a website where NGO could ask for what they need (report, program…) and people could work for them from home #theiwl—
ths1104 (@Ths1104) February 25, 2011

I got some interesting feedbacks. Here is the summary:

• Onlinevolunteering.org – This is exactly what I was looking for. It is powered by the UNDP which is a guarantee of seriousness. The interface is rather classical but clear.  I really wonder why NGOs are not taking more advantages of this website. I even could find some technical projects I would be able to volunteer.
• Catchafire - It could be what I was searching for but it only serves organizations in the Greater New York City area. Moreover I couldn’t find any technical project.
• Nabuur – It focuses on helping communities by putting them directly in contact with specialists. The projects proposed are not necessarily supervised by a NGO so volunteers should take care when applying.
• Social actions – This is a kind of search engine for online volunteering. Nevertheless, the interface is not clear, a lot of results are linking to donation websites and it is difficult to find concrete projects.
• If I ran the world – The concept behind this site is to connect people who need something and people who want to help. It doesn’t seem that there are projects proposed by NGOs but the way they connect people is interesting. “If I ran the world, I would…”
• Sparked – Similar to Aardvark in the way they identify common interests of people to connect them. They just need more projects/people. Great interface. Have a look !

3 projects I’d like to see happen

• Genealogy

An online collaborative genealogy tree that would connect all the persons who live or have lived. With photos, biography, maps…  The best trial is probably werelate.org.

• History

A Google Earth based collaborative historical atlas with links to sources, illustrations and videos. Should include various maps like frontiers, demography, battles…  Something like that :

• Science

A platform for online collaborative science that would allow everyone to propose a project or to join one. Should include wiki, Tex, peer-review system, bug report, photo gallery, etc. I already discussed this here. Colabscience.com could be a good starting point.

 

The big pop button

<rss version= “2.0 ” >

Crée par S. Horlander pour Firefox [1], le bouton RSS/Atom orange a fait son petit bonhomme de chemin. Il est actuellement présent sur la quasi totalité des sites d’actualités et des blogs – 3 fois ici !

RSS icône

Pour ceux qui ne savent pas encore à quoi sert ce bouton, c’est le moment de se lancer ; cliquez ici  et laissez-vous guider… Vous êtes maintenant inscrit à un flux standardisé d’informations agrégé et mis en page par votre “RSS Reader”. Particulièrement pratique pour suivre les mises à jours de vos blogs favoris sans avoir à les visiter un par un !

N’ayant pas trouvé de réponse à la question “Why the RSS icon is orange ?”, je vais me contenter de recopier ici quelques internauteries :

- Because it is a big “pop” color to attract your eye.
- Because nothing rhymes with it.
- Because patriotic people of Dutch background will choose the orange product over the competition.
- Because orange is the new black.
- Because of the Ukraine’s “Orange Revolution”.

Avec une telle popularité, le #FF7400 RSS Orange est déjà surprésent sur le web. Bref, il va falloir vous trouver un autre couleur pour vous démarquer.

A noter que bien que son fonctionnement soit souvent résumé en terme de “Broadcasting”, le RSS est en fait une requête et non pas un broadcast. Je trouve çà d’ailleurs franchement bizarre d’avoir ses flux RSS/Atom en pull plutôt qu’en push. En pull, chaque serveur reçoit x requêtes par heure et par souscriveur même lorsque le flux n’a pas été updaté. En push, il suffirait au contraire d’un seul envoi par souscriveur à chaque update du feed. Çà parait quand même plus logique. A moins que l’on ne considère le poids des souscriveurs inactifs…

</rss>

Notes

1. Brève histoire critique de la feed icon