Involve UNV Online Volunteers

Workspaces Future Makers
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@Nadia, @Noemi, the UNV project started really well. Congratulations, great great work!

We have discovered the existence of a UN online volunteering program (https://www.onlinevolunteering.org/en/org/resources/index.html). UNV has offered to put it at our disposal. Noemi was in cc on that exchange, but I wonder whether this is not more up Nadia’s street, what with the community management liaison.

The idea is this: online volunteers will simply be asked to log onto Edgeryders and share what they know about social innovators and changemakers in the six countries. Instant conversation boost! Where we are short of engagement managers we might ask them to suggest some, or put themselves forward.

Ladies, please get in touch with Elise Bouvet (elise.bouvet@unv.org) about this. We will need a call to action etc. It would be great of we could offer a little training, like participation in the calls Nadia is organizing.

Ping @Matthias because he might be interested in extending the same approach to the Nepal project. I am thinking online volunteers are probably bored silly – we are one of few orgs that actually knows how to use online volunteers, and coordinate them!

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Need a public group

I sent our contact an email to see how they can point us in their direction.

I suggest we either create a new public group for this project or re-work the settings in this current one, before we push any more public calls.

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Rework this one I asy

Of course, we will need Matt to run the SQL query. Hopefully he is OK with this?

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Sure sure, it’s ok

I’m working on this now. Had intended to get it done yesterday, but then we had an earthquake. Things that happen to you in Nepal :stuck_out_tongue:

Also thanks @Alberto for the online volunteers hint … I knew the program before, but did not get on the idea to connect it with our project, which is a good idea …

Ping @Matthias because he might be interested in extending the same approach to the Nepal project. I am thinking online volunteers are probably bored silly – we are one of few orgs that actually knows how to use online volunteers, and coordinate them!  - See more at: https://edgeryders.eu/en/comment/17149#comment-17149
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Oh no

I have been out of the newscycle and only saw this yesterday. So happy to hear you both and Maria are all ok.

Yes making the group public would be great.

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Done that.

The Youth Volunteering Coordination Space group and all its existing content is now public. All new content will also be public. Please remember to go through the group description and existing content to edit anything that should not be in the open or refers to the group as being closed.

The earthquake yesterday was 7.3 or 7.4, which is 6 times less energy than the 7.8 one from 2015-04-25 (because the magnitude scale is logarithmic – learned that yesterday …). That does not relate to effects on the surface directly, but in any case, 7.4 is muss less bad as it sounds at first. There is also much less infrastructure damage in Kathmandu from yesterday (mostly, “just” more brick-and-clay buildings in the old part of the city fell down).

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Notes from call with coordinator in Bonn

I talked to Elise Bouvet and she explained to me that to involve them we need to go through their own platform https://www.onlinevolunteering.org/en/org/ and publish tasks as online volunteering opportunities. As far as I understood, you can.t contact a person directly because the whole focus of the platform is on inclusivity and equal opportunities. And of course everything needs to be filtered and go through the procedure.

[4:46:35 PM] Noemi Salantiu: -the platform supports tasks (generally part time) with description, requirements of work and language. youth apply for a particular task; they get recognition for this particular task

[4:47:30 PM] Noemi Salantiu: -they apply for a particular task -> you select candidates and they need to report back there where you would review their work and they review your organisation

[4:49:33 PM] Noemi Salantiu: https://www.onlinevolunteering.org/en/org/index.html

[4:50:16 PM] Noemi Salantiu: 1. Create an individual account

[4:50:33 PM] Noemi Salantiu: 2. Look at eligibility for orgs -> Create an organisation account ( -need to attach the certificate of registration when creating the account); more people can then be assigned to manage the account.

[4:51:00 PM] Noemi Salantiu: 3. Account is approved by UNV -> you get a management tool - dashboard.

[4:51:00 PM] Noemi Salantiu: 4. Submit task opportunity which then is filtered/approved by UNV, they can also publish ongoing tasks on their newspage/ twitter

[4:51:41 PM] Noemi Salantiu: 4. Applications automatically appear on your account page + contact email of the people.

NB Once we post a task and people apply, we need to be prompt and be able to manage those people. Elise said volunteers expectations are to be managed, and here is where the organisation has full liberty. We need to be ready to go through a lot of applications should this be the case and accept/reject all so that each has a clear status.

This seems to be adding to daily drudgery, but we can try with one task and see how it goes. I am Afk next week, so I will create our account and it anyway takes a bit to be approved. When returning, I will put up our first task as a test for one of the countries… Probably Armenia, where the missions will be upcoming. This unless someone volunteers to

Our contact person once we register will be : Annika Diederich to help with any issues coming up.

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Broad tasks

Setting up teams, breaking work into tasks (already done for engagement managers) is something we need to do anyway in order for community members to be able to find ways in to help one another. It’s hard to prioritise this without knowing that there will be people who can and want to take on tasks. With access to UNVs online volunteers it starts to make a lot more sense.

Conducting interviews/building case studies, Engagement Management, Social Media Coordination, Translations, Fundraising research, Building and running crowdfunding campaigns, etc.

These are the kind of thing this could be useful for I think. I have an idea, will discuss during the weekly futuremakers team call today.

Back online now after Egypt btw.

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Registration pending

Dear Noemi Salantiu,

Thank you for your interest in involving online volunteers through the United Nations Volunteers Online Volunteering service.

We have received your application to register with the Online Volunteering service and will review it shortly.

Best regards,

Online Volunteering service

E-mail: info@onlinevolunteering.org

http://www.onlinevolunteering.org

http://www.unvolunteers.org

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Good work!

But I don’t understand: why do people need to apply to do tasks? There needs to be no selection. Suppose the task is “Interview a social innovator in Armenia”. The more, the better, no? And the selection criterion is that the task gets done.

Let’s consider killing the whole thing… this project needs to be kept simple, it is very difficult as it is.

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Too much overhead

In the end, @Noemi judged online volunteers unusable. In practice, UNV manages volunteers as unpaid labour, and management implies lots of overhead, coordination, assessment etc. Additionally, all of this needs to be done on UNV’s platform. So we did not use it, it’s more efficient to use our own channels.