If you live in the US or the UK, it feels like the answer should be “no”. In these countries, it feels as if there are now as many of them as pet food-selling start-ups during the dotcom boom. To mention only a few: VolunteerMatch, NetworkForGood, Idealist and TimeBank. The biggest is San-Francisco-based VolunteerMatch. In 2006, it averaged more than 38,000 active volunteer opportunities a day

Yet when it comes to sites listing opportunities in international volunteering, the field is much less crowded. And international online volunteering, although it has been around for quite a few years, is an even more open space. The UN, for instance, has pioneered the concept with a site called OnlineVolunteering. But the more relevant example for Lughenjo’s purposes is Nabuur, a Dutch site, whose name is an old Dutch word meaning “neighbour”.

Nabuur selects local communities (“villages”) that then can ask for help with projects such as a new computer training centre and a library. Specially trained volunteers (“facilitators”) split up the projects into tasks, which registered users (“neighbours”) can do on their computer within two to eight hours. In 2006, Nabuur had 150 villages and 8,000 neighbours, who completed 150 tasks and seven projects. OnlineVolunteering, for its part, had some 70,000 registered users last year, who among them completed 2,800 assignments.

Nabuur and OnlineVolunteering clearly show that online volunteering has a future. But they also underline what is missing for it to really take off, particularly at a global level. In many ways, it is in the state that online music was before Apple introduced the iPod and its iTunes service. Digital music players, tiny hard drives, downloading sites and rights management systems all existed before Steve Jobs combined his determination with a thick layer of marketing glue to create a set of blockbuster products.

As was the case with online music before the iPod, a trigger is needed for online volunteering: one powerful player with a highly trusted brand who dares to put it all together in order to create a global platform.

To see the potential of knowledge-and-skills-exchanges online, one need only take a closer look at for-profit firms in this space. On Elance, for instance, tens of thousands of small businesses post projects such as building a website and designing a logo. Freelancers around the world then bid for these projects. Elance facilitates these exchanges and takes a cut. Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, for its part, shows that even small jobs - which the service calls “human intelligence tasks” (or HITs) - are tradable online.

A similar site to exchange skills and knowledge to solve development problems could make a huge difference. International and local development organisations need money of course. But skills and knowledge are often the true bottleneck. And even if both are available locally, the networks to spread them are often missing. We believe that Lughenjo will not only be a partial substitute for such networks, but also help build them.

Great idea, you may think, but can Lughenjo attract a critical mass of volunteers and organisations to this skills exchange to give it enough liquidity? This certainly is a crucial issue, and we’ll cover it in our next post.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 3rd, 2007 at 3:19 pm and is filed under Innovation. You can follow any responses to this entry through the feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.