Mobile Volunteering - will it work?

There was a definite buzz as the Q&A finished and the conversations around the room began. About 50 people; mostly from the Third Sector, some social entrepreneurs; a few developers, who had heard the more formal presentations that introduced the concept of Mobile Volunteering. From the discussions and conversations I heard (and you can get a flavour of these from the Audioboo material Benjamin Ellis and I made at the time), there was a tangibility to the idea which could be felt in the room.

The concept is simple. Get 1 million people to spend less than 5 minutes using a mobile App to support a cause they are passionate about and to do something ‘useful’ for that cause (the combined customer base of Orange and T Mobile in the UK is about 30 million). There is, I suppose, prior art in some aspects of crowd-sourcing and in the use of ‘spare’ processing time of distributed PCs (SETI@home has 3 million users for example) and in the active participation of users ‘playing’ Fold.It to help understand the structure of proteins in biological research. It’s the scale of this and the potential speed at which it could happen that’s exciting.

So we heard David Simoes-Brown of 100%Open (http://www.100open.com/) cover the process they are using to build the community and decide on which Actions and Ideas to develop, Steven Day of Everything Everywhere (the newly created company that combines Orange and T Mobile in the UK; http://everythingeverywhere.com/) talk about the vision for the project and where it might go, Helen Davies, Head of Respect and Responsibility at Orange emphasise how this initiative builds on existing volunteering activity inside the business and links with Third Sector organisations and Jogdesh Limbani Head of Open Innovation at Orange Labs R&D describe the way in which they see the community will combine the needs of the causes with mobile technologies and Apps that can make a difference. You can see the notes I made in realtime using ScribbleLive which includes comments made on Twitter by others as well.

The cynics and sceptics among you will be asking the “What’s in it for Orange?” and “Will they make money out of it?” - I too asked those questions at the event last night; on Audioboo and on video and also face-to-face with the people who were there. Judge for yourself what you think of the answers. For my part, I don’t see Orange making money out of this, at least not directly, quite the reverse - I suspect there’s a significant resource commitment from this big corporate in pursuing this initiative with the energy and openness they are currently displaying. Those of you who know about rapid software development techniques and open innovation will already have worked out that while the potential benefits of the approach they are taking are big; so too are the resource demands. And Orange will benefit; from brand association and working with the charities, third sector organisations and social entrepreneurs they are building a community with, from access to new developers and the possibility of exposure to innovative thinking from small companies and through opportunities to develop their people that result from working on this project. I can see that to work, everyone needs to benefit - users have fun and do good using the Mobile Volunteering App, the causes get help and support, and Orange also benefits - no reason why it should be a ‘zero-sum’ game.

Will it work? If the user experience is quick, fun and valuable, the causes get real help and Orange and their partners can deal with the potential scale of the idea - I think it can. The big question, that Lauren Currie identified when I talked to her last night, is whether British culture and behaviours can make Mobile Volunteering as embedded in our lives as Texting. The only way to find out is to try it!