This information has been out since this summer and I have this sense of being vaguely aware of the company being mentioned in tweets, but there was no mention of its significance or I would have covered this at the time. I figured this was reason enough to mention it here and spread the word. (Or I was just living under a rock, but I couldn’t have been the only one.)

A company called The Extraordinaries has essentially shrunk Amazon’s Mechanical Turk service down to the cell phone level with a service called Sparked. I should clarify that this isn’t Amazon’s service offered through cell phones and the service rendered is voluntary rather than the paid work Amazon offers. The similarity is that it connects the needs of companies, in this case non-profits, with volunteers willing to do the work.

According to a piece on Springwise.com,

“…it enlists both individuals and groups of company employees to contribute their expertise to a nonprofit in even the smallest chunks of time. Nonprofits begin by posting requests to the site; those, in turn, are routed to would-be volunteers based on their skills and interests. Examples might include translating a page of a document into Spanish, for instance, or helping to choose a new logo; The Extraordinaries even has pre-built “kits” that turn a series of best practices into tasks for volunteers. Willing volunteers then complete the requests during a spare moment via iPhone (through a dedicated app) or web browser—or they can share it with their colleagues.”

Sparked uses the term micro-volunteering because the tasks are broken down into whatever segments of time you have available. You could conceivably perform tasks on the train commute into work or in a taxi on the way to a party. There are some examples of work that has been completed on their blog, including a recent story about a logo that one volunteer reworked.

I am probably not the first to say it, but given the way today’s digital culture is shaping interactions, I have to think this mode of activity mediated through technology is going to begin to figure largely in organizations’ volunteer programs. It doesn’t help with ushering and important face to face interactions, but it could help with promotional efforts, research, evaluation and maybe even editing program books and designing the covers.

Though I can see it now, people are so impressed with our organization when they attend a show, the decide to start microvolunteering on their iPhones during a performance leaving the staff in a quandary about asking them to stop.