Web Worker Daily

Web work doesn’t necessarily involve earning an income. Through the Internet, we can give back to the global community and do a different kind of online work — volunteering. Here are some ways to use a little of your time to help others.

Look for organizations that you can work with online. Many non-profit organizations have some volunteers working only through the Internet. The United Nations has a database of online opportunities for which you can apply. NABUUR is another online volunteering platform that connects local communities with online volunteers. For both sites, you can choose from a variety of tasks, including research, translation, writing, design and much more. Read the rest of this entry »

I came across this very interesting BusinessWeek article by Stephen Baker last week, which discusses how willing we are to do free work online, without even trying to receive monetary compensation for our efforts. Instead, he argues, we’re looking for different kinds of payback.

The non-monetary rewards most people who do these kinds of things, which include answering questions on Yahoo! Answers and finding weird buys to post to ThisNext.com, consist of things that we valued before we valued money, including praise and admiration.

For businesses and institutions hoping to use this massive emerging voluntary force to drive their own goals, the difficulty lies in determining just what it is that’s motivating people, and developing a rewards system accordingly. The difficulty is that much of the reward seems to be community-based, i.e., you contribute because you want to earn the respect of your peers, and to become an authority of sorts on whatever subject you happen to be interested in.

The article got me thinking about web working, and how much work I “give away”, as opposed to how much I receive compensation for.

Read the rest of this entry »