Mobile Voter, the group that innovation voter registration by text message, recently launched a program to turn people with a few minutes to spare waiting for a train or in line at the grocery store into volunteers. The program is called Volunteer Now, and it connects volunteers with projects through text messages. The combination of technology and civic action fits neatly into Mobile Voter’s mission to use technology to empower civic life and political engagement, with a specific focus on youth

Ben Rigby, Co-Executive Director of Mobile Voter, filled me in on the details about Volunteer Now. (Rigby is also the author of a ne w book, Mobilizing Generation 2.0.)

What does it do?

Volunteer Now enables people to spontaneously offer their expertise via mobile phones. Missed your train? Got 20 minutes? Review a contract for a nonprofit. Translate a document for a non English speaker. Identify craters for NASA. Give back in your spare time!

What inspired you to do it?

Projects like SETI@Home have showed that massive computational problems can be solved when a distributed group of people donate their computers’ spare CPUs to crunch data. This project will explore the possibility that this same theory can be applied to spare human “CPUs.” We believe that it will reveal a massive untapped capacity to do good.

How can people get involved?

They can contact me: ben@mobilevoter.org. We’re looking for programmers, designers, and creative people with great ideas to volunteer for the project. It’s an all volunteer/open source project.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 26th, 2008 at 10:57 am and is filed under Mobile, Publications, Tools and Apps, Youth Vote. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.