Digital do-gooders: Why do we help strangers online?
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-24207047
26 September 2013 Last updated at
00:23 GMT
All around the world, more and more
people are donating their time to take part in online volunteering projects.
What motivates them to help strangers without expectation of money or even
thanks?
Radha Taralekar helped teach Imelda how to protect herself from HIV, though
the two have never met, and neither knows the other's name.
From her home in Mumbai, the young doctor took several weeks to co-write a
guide especially for Imelda - who lost her children to HIV/Aids - and her
friends at the
Kitega Community Centre in
Uganda.
She received no payment for the job, which was advertised on a United Nations
website aiming to connect office-based volunteers with those in need of
help.
To the traditional volunteer it may sound a world away from serving food to
the homeless or sorting clothes in a local charity shop. There are no warm
smiles, no nods of appreciation and phone calls are sporadic, if they come at
all. Instead, thanks may arrive by email or instant message.
HIV awareness poster in Uganda: Online volunteers
give more tailored help
Taralekar is one of a number of talented individuals who regularly donate
their time online. But what is driving them to help total strangers, while
asking for nothing in return?
For Taralekar, the project gave her the chance to work
with people overseas without leaving her own country. "I'm just not very money
driven. I want to serve people, I want to come up with ideas," she says.
Kate Anderson, another online volunteer, used to help out at a local soup
kitchen in Georgetown, Washington DC where, she says, "lots of people were just
standing around. It wasn't helpful".
Instead she chose to file grant applications from her home in the US for a
charity in Pakistan which, she says, was a far better use of her professional
experience.
For others the inspiration to volunteer online was far more personal.
After losing his wife and sister to cancer, Tony Selman spent many hours
helping Cancer Research to analyse data on the disease. He uses
Cell Slider, a website that asks members
of the public to review microscopic photographs of tumour samples and place them
in different categories.
"I have the knowledge of how dreadful these diseases are. I sat with my wife
as she died. It's not an altruistic issue. It's the knowledge that you can
contribute something and get satisfaction from it.
"To be honest, it's one of the things that keeps me sane," he says.
One of Ricky McCormick's encrypted letters
encrypted /ɛnˋkrɪpt /
vt. 將...譯成密碼
In 2011 Sam Luk, a Manchester-based designer, joined other online enthusiasts
to try to help the FBI solve a murder case.
Twelve years earlier the body of Ricky McCormick had been found murdered in a
field in St Louis, Missouri - the only clues being two encrypted letters found
in his pockets. Unable to decipher the codes, the FBI
posted
them online, calling for volunteers to help them make sense of the encoded
messages.
"I'm interested in patterns and I love Sherlock Holmes," says Luk.
But there was also a social element to his work. He wrote a blog about the
project because he wanted to connect with like-minded people. "It was an outlet
to get across things that I can't chat to my mates about."
Luk spent hours trying to decrypt the notes, but the message eluded him, and
the case remains unsolved to this day.
For writer and web theorist Clay Shirky, this lack of interest in financial
gain is understandable.
He argues that we have become so accustomed to the idea of market forces
governing our society that "we forget that most people do most things without
getting paid for them".
"Anything that gives me a sense of membership or generosity gives me positive
feedback of the sort that I cannot get merely from earning money," he says.
Shirky thinks educated people around the world have about a trillion hours of
free time each year that could be contributed to collaborative projects, a
phenomenon he calls "cognitive surplus".
Wikipedia: One of the the world's biggest online
volunteering projects
Websites such as
Help from Home
encourage people to volunteer as little as a few minutes of their time. But some
online volunteers are willing to undertake projects on a scale that far
outweighs this "micro-volunteering".
Wikipedia, for example, the world's biggest encyclopaedia, is written
entirely by contributors willing to donate their expertise without monetary
reward.
And vast, complex pieces of open-source computer software have been pieced
together by armies of committed developers, often working for nothing.
Brian Behlendorf, a web pioneer who helped create Apache, a piece of software
that now underpins much of the world wide web, says a sense of rebellion against
Microsoft - who had become a dominant force in the desktop PC market - was one
of his main motivations.
Continue reading the main story
“Start Quote
Without the online volunteers, the project would be 20
years behind where it is today”
End
Quote David Clemy, Kitega Community
Centre
"There was an idealism there," he says. "We didn't want
the internet to go the same way as the desktop. We knew that open software was
best for everyone except one or two people at the top."
There are also purists who see writing code as an art form in itself - it can
be "ugly" or "beautiful" - and strive for ever more elegant forms of code,
according to author Steve Weber, who has written on the success of the
model.
"Is it altruistic? That's a bigger question than I'm willing to take on," he
says. "But I think it would be wrong to assume that there isn't a meaningful set
of people who just think 'Hey, I'm going to do this and give it away because
it's good for the world.'"
At the Kitega Community Centre in Uganda, volunteer co-ordinator David Clemy
agrees that those who help his charity from their respective homes around the
world are spurred on by a sense of idealism.
"They want to change the world," he says. And he is no doubt about the value
that they bring to Kitega.
"Without the online volunteers, the project would be 20 years behind where it
is today."
There will be more volunteering stories over the coming weeks in the BBC
News series Making
Time
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Making Time
A BBC News Magazine series about people who do things for good causes
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