Social Media: A New Form of Aid?

There has been a lot of excitement in the business sector regarding innovation in social media outlets.  Regardless if you are talking about social entrepreneurship, or plain business-as-usual, there is no denying that established tools like Facebook and Twitter have already changed the face of business promotion.  Furthermore, it is likely that the impact of these tools and other emerging platforms will continue to expand.  Among the new social business start-ups poised to catch fire is one promoting the fairly novel idea of microvolunteerism: charitable volunteer activities that can be performed in tiny increments of time (1-5 minutes each).  Even better, these mission can be conducted from the comfort of a computer chair, or on the go with a smart phone.

Enter The Extraordinaries, a team based out of San Francisco that collects a number of volunteer activities related to dozens of organizations into one space, offering subscribers the chance to take a crack at any of hundreds of projects – one tiny bite at a time.  Typically, many of the projects offered have been archival or anecdotal.  For example, one can take 30 seconds to tag objects in a photograph for a museum, or send words of encouragement to a struggling student halfway around the world.  Other projects seem somewhat more ambitious, such as searching through legislation for pork, or facilitating the documentation of cases of pollution, water waste, or abuse.  While the vision of co-founder Jacob Colker is admirable, the technology is still very new, and there has been some ambivalence regarding the efficacy and reach of such a ‘crowdsourced’ volunteer approach (see also: NPR’s take).

The winds may be changing however, as earlier last week The Extraordinaries launched a new mission related to the disaster unfolding in Haiti.  By pairing the flood of images pouring out from Port-au-Prince with eager volunteers, the mission aims to facilitate recovery of lost persons by creating a database of tagged images.  Families missing a loved one can go to this database to search, or to post a picture so that others can help them look.  It is a monumentally ambitious project that deserves some attention for its’ novelty alone.  While the effectiveness of The Extraordinaries in this mission is fully dependent on the size and activity of its members, I will surely be watching closely as this project unfolds.  Even a minor victory in this endeavor could have large repercussions for the future of volunteerism, as well as implications for what we can collectively do with our downtime.