Volunteer collaboration: are we ready to harness the power of the people?, por Bruno Ayres para el II Encuentro Internacional TIC para la Cooperación al Desarrollo.

1. II Encuentro Internacional de TIC para la Cooperación al Desarrollo
II Internacional Meeting on ICT for Human Development
Titulo: Volunteer collaboration: are we ready to harness the power of the people?
Autor: Bruno Ayres
Entidad: V2V Networks
Volunteer collaboration: are we ready to harness the power of the people?
The present economic crisis challenges us to find new ways of using our resources; hopefully,
more wisely. One of the most abundant and underused natural resources is volunteer
collaboration power. The experience of working in Internet projects for volunteer promotion tells
me that the best is yet to come.
Although the strength of civil society resides in the distributed engagement of citizens, its most
visible portion is the organized and institutional side of it. The same occurs with volunteerism:
the majority of specialists, media and governments refer to its institutional dimension,
underestimating the power of millions of citizens that are using collaboration, creativity and their
personal talents to bring solutions to their communities, independent from formal or organized
support.
This institutional dimension refers to non-profit organizations that usually offer pre-molded and
nearly bureaucratic models of engagement to citizens: using the same molds of formal
employment, like recruitment processes, ready-made activities, top down management etc.
These are legitimate ways to organize people’s work, but they are not the only ones and,
certainly, not the model of engagement that will leverage the latent collaboration power of
humanity.
One of the impediments for engagement of the ordinary citizen is the notion that volunteering is
something special, done by extraordinary people, far from their reality. This bar must be
lowered.
Volunteering is a human act, essential for daily life, developed by everyone, in various levels.
Actually, in low-income communities in Brazil, peer volunteerism and generosity is what gives
sustainability for people’s lives. Volunteering is way more diverse than the immediate images
associated with it.
This diversity should be valued and celebrated. People should feel included in the volunteer
movement – from small everyday acts (like recycling, conscious consuming, peer collaboration),
to formal and structured activities. The complex interactions between these acts make the
healthy social tissue.
Bringing this diversity to the public visibility can inspire and stimulate the hundreds of millions
who want to participate. There is a huge opportunity to create decentralized models for
collaboration and stimulate people to gradually evolve as more active volunteers.
In our experience in the V2V Networks, developing web technologies to promote volunteering,
it’s been very important to consider the volunteer’s life cycle. There are a lot of different ways to
contribute to a cause and the engagement can be progressive, beginning with a soft
contribution and evolving to a deeper and continuous participation. Volunteer program
managers always tend to prefer the last type of contribution, where one can get more return to
their recruitment efforts, but in doing so, many people are left behind.

2. II Encuentro Internacional de TIC para la Cooperación al Desarrollo
II Internacional Meeting on ICT for Human Development
Technology is transforming the way we collaborate. With the huge drop on the cost of
communications, the efforts of planning and organizing people’s work have also lowered.
Today, we see examples of great projects being possible by the volunteer contributions of huge
amounts of people, with most of the participants having contributed only once and with a tiny
piece of the puzzle.
Think of the Wikipedia: the largest encyclopedia ever produced, in number and depth of entries.
There, the few volunteer administrators and top contributors do most of the work: 1.8% of the
users are doing more than 70% of the edits.
The uniqueness of the Wikipedia could never be achieved by the 1.8% top contributors alone.
It’s not about the super users; it’s more about having a model that allows you not to lose one
tiny piece of the knowledge available in the community. It’s the capability of dealing with mass
collaboration that makes this volunteer project one of the most important achievements of
human collective knowledge.
When we want to get things done, be it a social or profitable venture we usually create an
organization, so that we can get 70% of the work done employing the efforts of 1% of the
people. That’s our mindset, and economically that makes sense, doesn’t it?
But doing this, we give up significant value: diversity, innovation and, more importantly when
speaking about volunteering, the opportunity to include the majority of the citizens that could
also be part of the solution, instead of being only part of the problem. This is something to think
about when rethinking our roles and projects in an interconnected world of nearly 6.7 billion
people.
But, how could volunteer projects tap into these new models of collaboration? Since 2004,
we’ve been using social networking tools to promote volunteerism in Brazil. This project, V2V
Networks (Volunteer-to-Volunteer) was created in Rio de Janeiro, in a strong collaboration with
companies that wanted to give voice for their employees, families and customers who were
interested in volunteering.
Pretty much the same revolution e-bay did to retail market, creating a trusted environment so
that individuals could also sell their products, V2V encourages volunteers to be producers, not
consumers, of volunteer opportunities - to ordinary people as agents of positive change in
society.
The essence of V2V is to give the power of promoting volunteerism directly to the individual in
his local community. V2V gives visibility to people’s profiles and interests in web social networks
that are created and updated by the users themselves. Reducing the intermediation and
formality in volunteering it is possible to significantly broaden channels of participation.
In a global partnership with Starbucks Coffee Co, V2V became a global project. It is now a
growing social network that's being used in companies, universities and cities by 85,000+
volunteers, who are developing 12,000+ volunteer actions in 64+ countries.
Including people’s desire to contribute is the great challenge of our work, as promoters of
volunteerism. The only way to get rid of top-down approaches, “assistencialism”, dependency
and other risks of volunteer projects is to involve all stakeholders in the effort.
The work of amateurs has always been an important expression of volunteer collaboration.
They have time and motivation to do great things in personal projects. This happens frequently
because lots of people feel that they are not doing things at work that are special to them. It’s in

3. II Encuentro Internacional de TIC para la Cooperación al Desarrollo
II Internacional Meeting on ICT for Human Development
their free time, in peer interaction to their local and virtual communities that these people are
doing things that really matter to them. This is a huge opportunity for volunteer engagement:
there are incredible amounts of people out there seeking for meaning in the things they do.
Groups of creators are today the great competitive power against large global corporations.
Think Linux servers against Windows servers. Who could try to beat Microsoft, a 60 billion dollar
company, with private funding?
In near future, these new mass collaborative-networked groups will play a bigger role in
providing solutions to human needs. The vast majority of these groups will rely on volunteers.
Traditional structured organizations will defend themselves, trying to undermine the trust and
value of these new collaborative models.
Charles Leadbeater, an advisor for governments and companies on innovation and creativity,
asks some very good questions about the future of human collaboration: “Can we survive on
volunteers? If such collaborative models are so critical do we not need funded organized
support in much more structured ways? What kind of changes are needed in public policies and
funding, to make these models of volunteer collaboration possible?”. These are possibly the
questions that policy makers will be asking in near future, he says.
What a great impact for the cause it would be to broaden our understanding of volunteerism and
create bridges between these two worlds. This is a major global opportunity and a strategic
positioning for the cause of volunteerism. Great human challenges for the future, like terrorism,
climate change, communicable diseases as well as massive migrations can all benefit by such
volunteer collaboration models. These are questions we should probably pose to ourselves
sooner than later.
Businesses are also tapping into these new forms of volunteer collaboration and using the same
vocabulary and recognition models that promoters of volunteerism have always used. Recently,
the October 2008 issue of Harvard Business Review brought the great article: “The Contribution
Revolution: Letting Volunteers Build Your Business”, by Scott Cook. He brings the innovative
ways in which businesses are using their client’s collective knowledge and collaboration power
to create better products and services.
Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff, in their recent book called “Groundswell”, there is the story of Jeff
Stensky: he works for an electric power company as a design engineer. On his own spare time,
he posts answers in the Dell’s community support forum, although he is not paid for it. In 10
years of intense participation in this community, Jeff has posted 22,000 answers about Dell’s
CD/DVD drives. His answers were viewed more than 2 million times by other people. The
authors estimate that Jeff, by himself, has saved Dell over US$1 million in support calls that
were not made to Dell’s support center. So, here’s the big question: why did he do this? Why so
enormous dedication? Jeff answers: “I actually enjoy helping people. That’s what got me
hooked: when you help people and they say ‘thank you’.” Haven’t we heard that already from
volunteers we work with in our social projects?
This is what is remarkable here: when examining the motivations of people like Jeff (good
feelings from altruism, validation and belonging), we see that they are very similar to the
feelings of the traditional volunteers we know. It’s something that the economists Fetter & Fisher
called psychic income, in the 1920s. Psychic income is “the subjective value of nonmonetary
satisfaction gained from an activity”. This concept is central to understand volunteer
collaboration. As Groundswell’s authors say: “Psychic Income is free – it’s paid in love, not
money”.

4. II Encuentro Internacional de TIC para la Cooperación al Desarrollo
II Internacional Meeting on ICT for Human Development
The good news is, people seeking for psychic income are widespread. This is what keeps us so
busy as promoters of volunteerism. There are a lot of people like Jeff out there.
In Bill Gates’ recent article in Time magazine, he states that historically, businesses have
improved the lives of billions of people. The problem is that, he continues, there are billions
more left behind and businesses have a great responsibility and potential to help improve
capitalism to make it more inclusive.
There are a myriad of business opportunities to bring better scalable and sustainable products,
while still creating local value, reducing inequality, improving health and quality of life. But
businesses will not do that alone. They need people. Their people will do it. And the good news
is: there are a lot of good people employed there, willing to collaborate; and our work as
promoters of volunteerism can help influence them positively.
Lastly, I think we should look back to our origins, to the heritage of our labor. There was a
strong spiritual value on the first humans that went out of their way to help others. We must help
reinforce these values on every human endeavor, be it personal, collective, public or private.
We have the opportunity to bring these values to a broader audience and other spaces; people
are seeking for meaning in their lives. Let’s broaden our minds and rethink volunteerism as
something embedded in every aspect of our lives. For the uncertain times to come, the values
of volunteering are needed today more than ever.