Imagine we do not only use our mobile phones to make phones calls and SMS, but to contribute to science. How does that work? We can directly engage in micro-voluntarism or contribute valuable information without doing much more than carrying our mobile phone with us. Just as volunteers share computer processing power or look out for new galaxies, so can mobile phones become tools that collect valuable data.

Cairo traffic jam by tronics on flickr (CC)

How does that work?

Newest mobiles phones have global position system (GPS), which shows on a map where you are at the moment. Google and TomTom have developed – independently from each other – an initiative to use location-based data to gather real time traffic information. It is quite simple and genial. GPS can determine whether you move fast or slow, so if you are probably in a car or walking.  So, if feedbacks are sent from an area of slow or non movement where the map indicates a highway, then it is much likely that there is a traffic jam.

The Swiss datenvisualization.ch blog has a nice image to show how it works. (By the way a great resource!)

Location services through all devices

By the way Google offers location position system also for non-GPS enabled phones and browsers (Firefox). How? They have a huge database of mobile tower locations. Computers have an IP address, and a wifi access point delivers another proximity. A bit scary if you think of privacy.

Mobile phones sensors

But that is just the beginning. Nokia has developed a mobile phone with sensors to gather results from your environment, such as noise level, pollution, personal health, weather monitoring, etc. Scientists from MIT call it “Reality Mining” and “provide insight into the dynamics of both individual and group behavior.” The Economist has an interesting article called Mobile Phones: Sensors and Sensitivity.

“Eric Paulos, a computer scientist at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, predicts the rise of “citizen scientists” able to measure and sample their surroundings wherever they go. He foresees amateur experts being driven by a new sense of volunteerism,… Dr Paulos has already equipped street sweepers in San Francisco and taxis in Accra, the capital of Ghana, with sensors to measure pollution levels, which he then used to create a map of each city’s environmental landscape. He plans to do the same with cyclists in Pittsburgh.“

This information can then be offered again for mobile phone users through applications with augmented reality, the latest hype around mobile phones. Tim Boucher has post, where he outlines a critical way augmented reality can lead to:

Privacy and surveillance

The flip side of the coin is privacy and potentially larger surveillance of citizens. Iphone owners already can get a taste of it. Pinch Media Spyware can be implemented by any Iphone-application-developer and can send your location and much more to the developer. Potentially, a programmer can develop profiles of movements. As long as a mobile is not really turned off, it continuously sends information and therefore can be located. In countries with authoritarian governments one can imagine, how easy it is to monitor exactly where dissidents are moving if they do not protect themselves.

Technology driven volunteerism?

Step by step mobile phones develop to a much broader instrument. It can help to valuable data for development such as another project described in the Economist article:  “A good example is the study of well-water contamination in Bangladesh conducted by Andrew Gelman, a statistician at Columbia University. His project combined readings from remote water-sensors with queries and data which villagers keyed into their mobile phones.“

In particular in development projects a sufficient data base is often not giving. Ushahidi has shown the potential for mobile crowdsourcing. Eric Paulos “foresees amateur experts being driven by a new sense of volunteerism, the 21st-century equivalent of cleaning up the neighbourhood park.” However, it has to secure that this information guarantee privacy and are a free public good.

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One of the greatest things about the Internet is that you can get in touch with people worldwide. I remember that back on the day I chatted for the first time and read from bluemoon11 that the sun was shining in Sidney. Twelve years ago that seemed breathtaking, but today it is rather amusing. Simultaneously, in the past, time volunteer engagement in other countries was a job quite difficult to tackle. You either knew someone or had friends from within, who were involved in a project, or got convinced by the volunteer in the pedestrian walk to donate money to their organization.

This has changed quite a lot, with fascinating new ways to individually engage on a peer to peer basis. Nowadays you can not only choose your donor, but also get yourself involved and follow the whole project and its outcome (e.g. Globalgiving or Kiva). There are also many more ways to engage such as the global neighbourhood Nabuur, where not everything is just about money, but also about the expertise that thousands of volunteers worldwide bring to the community. The social web has unleashed a huge wave of massive collaboration for social good already difficult to oversee. Being it science without borders, or working jointly on the first open source ecological village, or individually start their own little fundraising project, a small Facebook group, and ask for further action.

That brings up the questions: What organization will and can play in the future? We are slowly moving into ad-hoc peer-to-peer voluntarism independent from organizations. A nightmare for a classical fundraising approach. Certainly, organizations which depend on personal donations and mobilization of members will have a tough time if they do not include their audience.

But lets come back to new ways of volunteering. No doubt it is and will always be difficult to come up with new projects to fund, but there are now many existing projects which developed around all types of volunteer work efficiently. In many of this cases, costs are minimal and the output much higher thanks to all the expertise from participants. This is the case for a project outline not only written by two experts, but in a Wikipedia kind of fashion by numerous volunteers, which highlights all kinds of experiences. Will the chances of success be higher, or is the complexity of the project setting overwhelming? I imagine the more expertise there is, the better the project can be implemented. Look at the Katine project by the Guardian, where suddenly a project is portrayed from all different angles.

Another promising aspect of micro-volunteering can be seen on pages such as microvoluntarios.org and extraordinaries.org. In the first, volunteers can contribute with small tasks, which seems also attractive to companies, who donate the time of their employees. In the second, you can even donate through your mobile phone from wherever you are. Giulio Quaggiotto wrote a nice blog post about it.

Waiting for the bus and have nothing better to do than play around with your phone? Games are no longer the only options – now you can volunteer. The Extraordinaries (hat tip: Chris Kreutz) “delivers micro-volunteer opportunities to mobile phones that can be done on-demand and on-the-spot.” Here’s some examples of what you could do while waiting for your doctor’s appointment: translate micro-finance loan applications (Kiva); transcribe subtitles for human rights videos (Witness) or help immigrants improve their English (Phone ESL). A nice example of tapping into the collective “cognitive surplus” for social innovation purposes.

So, not mass, but micro-collaboration might be next big thing. There are many examples which show that this could have working results even though, so far, only a minority knows about these new ways of engaging. Donating was yesterday, engaging yourself is next.

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