Got 5 minutes?

Every day we are asked for our most valuable commodity, time! Whether it's your boss, spouse/partner/boyfriend/girlfriend, friend, your body asking for a break, or HandsOn Northeast Georgia asking you to volunteer, we are all asking for some of your time.

As a volunteer center, the biggest challenge we have is overcoming the response, "well I just don't have time to volunteer or to make a regular commitment." While we are always working with our agency partners to develop one-time, beneficial projects to forward their mission, there are still those that feel they just don't have the time to give. Well thanks to the folks at The Extraordinaries, there are now more opportunities to change the world that just take a few minutes.

The Extraordinaries are helping to move forward the notion of micro-volunteering. By harnessing technology, they are providing opportunities for volunteers to help out in 5 minute- 30 minute increments, whatever time you've got whenever you've got it (they even an app for that).

Today I received a new weekly newsletter that contains current projects (join e-mail list here). The project involved Twitter and harnessing ideas regarding social media, two of my favorite things. So I thought I'd walk the walk and helped out. The following is what resulted.

The Project: Scan through over 1,300 tweets about crowdsourcing at SXSW panel and vote to see which ones had good information to help them rise above the general "wow the workshop is really filling up fast" and "@___________ that was a good point" tweets to find the tweets that had good points or good tips. The end result, hopefully when this project is completed then a Top 10 tips and resources for how nonprofits can use crowdsourcing.

What I accomplished: In 15 minutes of volunteering. I scanned through 15 pages of tweets and voted on 12 tweets as containing what I thought was helpful information.

So there you have it all it took was 15 minutes and I helped move the mark a little bit further. And this was just one of the 250+ projects available. A quick glance of their website shows that KaBoom needs help mapping playscapes in communities and the Smithonian needs photos tagged to help create a searchable photo archive.

So do you have 5,10, or 15 minutes that you can help out? Remember helping some is better than none!

What to help locally? BikeAthens has a way for cyclists to help through their "share your commute" efforts. (Btw, this is also a good example of crowdsourcing which I learned about through my extraordinaires project).

HandsOn NEGA partners- are there any projects that you could use a team of micro-volunteers to help tackle bit by bit? Let us know!