The Bay Area-based Extraordinaires are among the social causes highlighted in the current issue of Time magazine in an article titled New Ways to Make a Difference.

Time identified three new trends in doing good:

Put your time to work

1The Extraordinaries: The organization is helping to pioneer “micro-volunteering.” As co-founder Jacob Colker told us last week at Net Tuesday, only 26 percent of Americans volunteer — at all — in a given year. That’s partly because we lead super-busy lives. Beextra.org gives us a way to contribute bits and pieces of our spare time to do something worthy, from helping to add tags to museum archives to snapping water going to waste in San Diego. Got an iPhone? Look for an app called The Extraordinaries.

2IfWeRantheWorld.com, due to launch this fall, “encourages you to dream big — end poverty! cure cancer! — and then helps come up with small, specific ways you can help achieve progress in those areas.”

3Kinded.com promotes random acts of kindness. First, print a card at the Kindred site, then “do something nice for a stranger, like sharing an umbrella or helping carry luggage, and hand that person the card. The recipient can go online and note where the act of kindness took place and then pass the card along. It’s like Pay It Forward, with mapping features,” Time writes.

4AllforGood.org, a new aggregation site of volunteer opportunities that we wrote about three months ago, draws listings not only from traditional volunteer sites but also from Craigslist and Meetup. It also lets you share those opportunities with friends on social networks.

Put your money to work

5eBay’s WorldofGood.com is one of our favorite sites. Buy a fair-trade scarf or the work of an African artisan on the site, which vets every product to ensure that it’s eco-friendly and was produced in a worker-friendly environment.

6Kiva.org has been one of the breakout success stories of the Web 2.0 social good space, and not just because our own Sloane Berrent is winding up a three-month stint as a Kiva fellow in the Philippines. (Here’s her wrapup piece.) Kiva lets you provide a micro-loan (typically $25) to an entrepreneur in the developing world, and then lets you track the recipient’s progress online. Now there are specialized sites like Wokai.org, which provides micro-loans in rural China. (Wokai is Mandarin for “I start.”)

7SocialInvest.org is advancing socially and environmentally responsible investing. Find out how to shift your dollars to match your values. More than 1 in 9 dollars in the U.S. stock market is now invested in socially responsible funds.

Put your friends to work

8Carrotmob, from Virgance, is an ad hoc organization that organizes “reverse boycotts” to reward businesses that are making socially responsible decisions. A massive shop-in, held every month or two (including one on Thursday night in San Francisco), entices the owners to use a portion of the revenues to get greener.

9DonorsChoose.org, which we’ll be profiling here soon, lets you earmark an online contribution to fund public-school teachers’ requests for classroom materials.

10TimeBanks.org is spreading a form of reciprocal community service, including everything from day care to tutoring. Time Banking is a social change movement in 22 countries and six continents that weaves community one hour at a time.

And Time adds: “Join a neighborhood volunteer group like Brooklyn’s In Our Backyard and Washington’s CarbonfreeDC, which help groups of friends partner on projects — like planting gardens and teaching people how to green their homes — and have some fun along the way.”

Related

• 25 responsibility pioneers (Time)

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Last night was another one of those eye-popping events where large numbers of people turn out for an event to discuss how new technologies can be used to advance social change. In this case, about 120 people turned out for Crowdsourcing for social good, sponsored by SocialEarth, and Hub Bay Area and hosted by Chronicle Books and organized by Sundeep Ahuja.

The gathering triggered a dozen ideas for future blog posts on Socialbrite, and since I don’t have time today to research all of the sites and initiatives mentioned, I’ll pass along some of the best nuggets:

• I met Leila Janah of Samasource (“computer-based work for women, youth and refugees living in poverty)” at last fall’s Craigslist Nonprofit Bootcamp when her nonprofit was just getting launched. Here’s our earlier interview: Samasource enables socially responsible outsourcing. The goal, she said last night, is to offer “dignified computer-based work to the most marginalized communities in world.” At the moment, Samasource has brought in $210,000 in payments from project leaders to 517 people in six countries, many of whom had been making than $125 a year. (Become a fan of Samasource on Facebook. The event raised $380 for the nonprofit.)

• Jon Bischke, founder of eduFire, talked about his start-up — an open education platform that is pioneering live video education. On the year-old site, more than 5,000 people have signed up to become instructors and 30,000 people take lessons in a wide array of subjects. Based in San Francisco, eduFire has three full-time employees and several part-timers. (Become a fan on Facebook.) See an earlier video interview of Jon produced by DogandPony.com.

• Fun factoid from Bischke: “It took 100 million hours to build Wikipedia, and that’s the same amount of time that Americans spend watching TV in a typical week.”

• I invited Jacob Colker, co-founder of The Extraordinaries, to join me in speaking at Net Tuesday on Sept. 8, and Jacob once again dazzled the audience with accounts of how crowdsourcing can be used for positive social change in your spare time. “The Extraordinaries are here to make it ridiculously easy for you to do social good,” he said. You can translate documents, or identify figures in a painting, or help with science and medical problems, among many other options. (Become a fan on Facebook.)

• Mechanical Turk from Amazon took up a surprisingly large amount of the discussion. It’s a way for people to earn small amounts of money by doing mostly repetitive online chores (with a few exceptions that require creative thinking). According to the latest stats, 76 percent of those who work on Mechanical Turk are from the United States, followed by India (now that Amazon supports payments there), with workers from the Philippines joining at a rapid clip.

Typically, a person signed up for a Mechanical Turk project makes 2 to 6 cents per task. “That’s real income in some of the poorest areas of the world,” Leila said. “I’m shocked at how many cost-conscious start-up CEOs haven’t heard of it,” Jon added.

• Great idea from Leila: “Maybe Amazon should do a Facebook Connect implementation so you can see the real person behind the work [on Mechanical Turk] instead of a faceless entity — an invisible unit of labor.”

• Turkopticon is helping to organize Mechanical Turkers.

“We’re at the beginning of a fascinating time in how we organize human labor,” Jacob said.

True. Much more to come on this subject.

Readings

Recommended reading from last night (at Amazon):

• Crowdsourcing: Why the Power of the Crowd Is Driving the Future of Business
• Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations
• A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future

The post Harnessing the crowd for social good appeared first on Socialbrite.

At the first Awareness2Action gathering in San Francisco in August 2008 I heard about eBay’s Giving Works program, which has raised $150 million for charitable causes on eBay over its first five years. These folks rock!

I swung down to eBay headquarters in San Jose a few weeks later and chatted with Kristin Cunningham, the program’s general manager. The video explains how you can help nonprofits through your purchases on eBay (and how nonprofits can help themselves).

Here’s our 9-minute conversation:

Watch or embed video on Vimeo (embedded above)
Watch or download video in H.264 QuickTime on Ourmedia
Download original video from Archive.org

Cross-posted to Socialmedia.biz.

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