If you think students spend all their spare time avoiding studying, going out with their mates and having a good time then you'd be right. Well our student bloggers do anyway. While they assure us they don't slack on the study, they've got a lot to answer for when it comes to enjoying themselves while volunteering.

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Sunday May 17, 2009

Volunteering Online

It is exam revision time, and so I find myself attached to my laptop for a ridiculous amount of time each day, and also doing a ridiculously small amount of revision. As I'm going to spend the next three weeks avoiding Property Law by sampling whatever the internet can offer me, I thought it might be apt to talk about online volunteering.

Obviously the emergence of the internet has brought new opportunities to volunteer, and new organisations to work with. In some Citizens Advice Bureaux you can advise people on their problems through e-mail, or you can use your Ebay nous and help Oxfam with their online shop. These are just two examples of the traditional notion of volunteering, but done online. However, there are other things happening on the internet.

Take Wikipedia for instance. This free online encyclopaedia depends almost entirely on people giving up their time up for free. Some users spend hours of the day deleting Wikipedia vandalism, or adding new information to articles about such absurdities as exploding whales. However, these users are rarely noted as 'volunteers'.

It goes further: forums, blogs, even social networking sites - like the Bermuda triangle for students that is Facebook - all these sites depend on time given up by their users, without payment. Again, these users do not call themselves 'volunteers'.

Whilst it is probably a little far-fetched to pass off 5 hours of Facebook stalking as 'volunteering', I do think that the contributions made on sites such as Wikipedia really should come under the V banner. After all, it's pretty hard to nail down what volunteering is essentially about anyway.

Without boring you by discussing what makes something 'voluntary', or where the word's obscure Latin roots lie (from: voluntas "will," and velle "to wish," by the way); I suppose we can agree that most things done for something other than yourself, and for free, might come under volunteering.

And if we agree on that, then this is great: we have a lot more volunteers than we first thought, and not just online. Additionally, if we carried this message more, there wouldn't be any qualms about the supposed negative perception of volunteering – because everybody is doing it, it's just at the moment they don't call it volunteering.

I'm hopeful anyway, and as a short aside here are some websites which the charity, UK Citizens Online Democracy runs. If you are interested in doing some online volunteering, they are always looking for more help:

Theyworkforyou – Keeping tabs on your MPs and what they get up to

Fixmystreet – Making sure the council knows when those potholes get too much

Pledgebank – Want to do something, but only if other people will do it too? Try here.

Posted by Harry ( 7:19 PM )
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