iVolntr.org falls into the Type III innovation category as defined in NESTA's 'Total Innovation' report. It is about tying together a host of digital editing technologies (like google docs), existing social networks (like facebook), and open standards (like opensocial and the dataportability initiative) to remove the existing perceptual and real barriers to volunteering (particularly for the facebook generation) and thus change the way volunteering is perceived and done.
The project is about crowdsourcing time and skill on a many-to-one-basis to facilitate people helping people, and people helping organisations; by creating, commenting and editing individual and organisational information directly through the webpage in immediate response to need or request. It will be primarily designed to support social organisations and disadvanted groups in developed information economies like ours, where so much is facilitated by or done through desktop computing.
iVolntr then is essentially about innovation in social behaviour and the development of Personal Social Responsibility (PSR). By removing the commitment, physicality and localisation factors present in traditional volunteering models, as well as removing the effort in finding out about opportunities to help (for eg. through a facebook app) we should be able to leverage personal need for social kudos to create a sustainable culture of social enthusiasm and a sustainable supply of help for disadvantaged individuals and the third sector.
