via labnol.org
This is what I have been writing about lately… web 3.0, the semantic web.
The Evolution of Web 3.0
via slideshare.net
Great presentation on the evolution of the web and what it means for us.
Virtual volunteering – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopediaJump to: navigation, search
A major contributor to this article appears to have a close connection with its subject. It may require cleanup to comply with Wikipedia’s content policies, particularly neutral point of view. Please discuss further on the talk page. (March 2010) Virtual volunteering is a term describing a volunteer who completes tasks, in whole or in part, offsite from the organization being assisted, using the Internet and a home, school, telecenter or work computer or other Internet-connected device. Virtual volunteering is also known as online volunteering, cyber service, telementoring, and teletutoring, and various other names. Virtual volunteering is similar to telecommuting, except that, instead of online employees who are paid, these are online volunteers who are not paid, and they are working to benefit a nonprofit organization, school, government program or other not-for-profit entity, as opposed to a for-profit business.
Contents
[hide]
[edit] In practice
People engaged in virtual volunteering undertake a variety of activities from locations remote to the organization or people they are assisting, via a computer or other Internet-connected device, such as:
- translating documents
- researching subjects
- creating web pages
- editing or writing proposals, press releases, newsletter articles, etc.
- developing material for a curriculum
- designing a database
- designing graphics
- providing legal, business, medical, agricultural or any other expertise
- counseling people
- tutoring or mentoring students
- moderating online discussion groups
- writing songs
- creating a podcast
- editing a video
- monitoring the news
- answering questions
- tagging photos and files
- managing other online volunteers[1][2][3]
[edit] Early history of the practice
The practice of virtual volunteering to benefit nonprofit initiatives dates back to at least the early 1970s, when Project Gutenberg began involving online volunteers to provide electronic versions of works in the public domain.[4]
In 1995, a new nonprofit organization called Impact Online (now called VolunteerMatch), based in Palo Alto, California, began promoting the idea of “virtual volunteers”.[5] In 1996, Impact Online received a grant from the James Irvine Foundation to launch an initiative to research the practice of virtual volunteering and to promote the practice to nonprofit organizations in the USA. This new initiative was dubbed the Virtual Volunteering Project, and the web site was launched in early 1997.[6] After one year of operations, the Virtual Volunteering Project moved to the Charles A. Dana Center at The University of Texas at Austin. In 2002, the Virtual Volunteering Project moved within the university to the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs.
The first two years of the Virtual Volunteer Project were spent reviewing and adapting telecommuting manuals[7] and existing volunteer management guidelines with regarding to virtual volunteering, as well as identifying organizations that were involving online volunteers. By April 1999, almost 100 organizations had been identified by the Virtual Volunteering Project as involving online volunteers and were listed on the web site.[8]
Due to the growing numbers of nonprofit organizations, schools, government programs and other not-for-profit entities involving online volunteers, the Virtual Volunteering Project stopped listing every such organization involving online volunteers on its web site in 2000, and focused its efforts on promoting the practice, profiling organizations with large or unique online volunteering programs, and creating guidelines for the involvement of online volunteers.
Until January 2001, the Virtual Volunteering Project listed all telementoring and teletutoring programs in the USA (programs where online volunteers mentor or tutor others, through a nonprofit organization or school). At that time, 40 were identified.[9]
[edit] Current state of the practice
Virtual volunteering has been adopted by at least a few thousand nonprofit thousand organizations and initiatives.[10] There is no organization currently tracking best practices in online volunteering in the USA or worldwide, how many people are engaged in online volunteering, or how many organizations are involving online volunteers, and studies regarding volunteering, such as reports on volunteering trends in the USA, rarely include information about online volunteering (for instance, a search of the term virtual volunteering on the Corporation for National Service‘s “Volunteering in America” yields no results.[11])
The United Nations runs an online volunteering service, formerly a part of NetAid, that allows organizations working in or for the developing world to recruit online volunteers, and does have statistics available regarding numbers of online volunteers and organizations involving such through its service. Several other matching services, such as VolunteerMatch and Idealist, also offer virtual volunteering positions with nonprofit organizations in addition to traditional, onsite volunteering opportunities. VolunteerMatch currently reports that around 5 percent of its active volunteer listings are virtual in nature. As of June 2010, its directory included more than 2,770 such listings including roles in interactive marketing, fundraising, accounting, social media, and business mentoring. The percentage of virtual listings has dropped since 2006, when it peaked at close to 8 percent of overall volunteer opportunities in the VolunteerMatch system.
Wikipedia and other Wikimedia endeavors are examples of online volunteering, in the form of crowdsourcing; the majority of Wikipedia contributing volunteers aren’t required to undergo any screening or training by the nonprofit for their role as researchers, writers or editors, and do not have to make a specific time commitment to the organization in order to contribute service.
Micro-volunteering is also an example of virtual volunteering and crowd-sourcing, where volunteers undertake assignments via their PDAs or smartphones. These volunteers aren’t required to undergo any screening or training by the nonprofit for such tasks, and do not have to make any other commitment once a micro-task is completed.[12] Micro-volunteering was invented by a San Francisco-based social enterprise called The Extraordinaries in 2008.[13][14][15]
[edit] See also
[edit] References
- ^ “What are examples of virtual volunteering?”. AIDSvolunteers.ca. http://www.aidsvolunteers.ca/vvfacts/general.html#examples. Retrieved 5 October 2009.
- ^ “examples of virtual volunteering”. University of Texas at Austin. http://www.serviceleader.org/old/vv/examples.html. Retrieved 5 October 2009.
- ^ “Make a Difference From Home: Be a Virtual Volunteer”. theextraordinaries.org. http://www.theextraordinaries.org/2008/11/make-a-difference-from-home-be-a-virtual-volunteer.html. Retrieved 5 October 2009.
- ^ Cravens, Jayne (Spring 2007). “Online Volunteering Enters Middle Age – And Changes Management Paradigms”. Nonprofit Quarterly (Nonprofit Quarterly).
- ^ Green, Marc (Fall, 1995). “Fundraising in Cyberspace: Direct E-Mail Campaigns, Virtual Volunteers, Annual Fund Drives Online. Does the Information Superhighway lead to new horizons or a dead end?”. The Grantsmanship Center Magazine (The Grantsmanship Center).
- ^ Cravens, Jayne (February 2001). “who funds the virtual volunteering project?“. The Virtual Volunteering Project (University of Texas at Austin).
- ^ Cravens, Jayne (April 2001). “related resources“. The Virtual Volunteering Project (University of Texas at Austin).
- ^ Cravens, Jayne (February 2001). “Virtual Volunteering Project“. The Virtual Volunteering Project (University of Texas at Austin).
- ^ Cravens, Jayne (February 2001). “[http://www.serviceleader.org/old/vv/orgs/mentor.html agencies and initiatives that involve online volunteers as mentors or tutors]“. The Virtual Volunteering Project (University of Texas at Austin).
- ^ Cravens, Jayne (Spring 2007). “Online Volunteering Enters Middle Age – And Changes Management Paradigms”. Nonprofit Quarterly (Nonprofit Quarterly).
- ^ volunteeringinamerica.gov. Retrieved 09/24/2009.
- ^ http://nonprofit.about.com/od/volunteers/a/microvol.htm
- ^ http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=106118736
- ^ http://www.csmonitor.com/Innovation/Responsible-Tech/2009/0804/smart-phone-app-lets-you-do-good-deeds-in-your-spare-time
- ^ http://abclocal.go.com/kgo/story?section=news/assignment_7&id=7162300
[edit] External links
- The Virtual Volunteering Project
- The Virtual Volunteering Guidebook
- Virtual Volunteer opportunities at VolunteerMatch.org
Retrieved from “http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_volunteering“
via en.wikipedia.org
This is a great idea for non-profits. I wonder how one finds volunteers? This is something that I want to discover.
Bruce Whealton
http://brucewhealton.us
About Bruce Whealton
Bruce Whealton – Web Developer, Writer, Poet, Publisher
Bruce Whealton is an American poet, publisher, editor and web designer/developer. Bruce Whealton is co-editor with Jean Arthur Jones for the online magazine Word Salad Poetry Magazine. Bruce Whealton lives in North Carolina. He has seen many of his poems published in various books, journals/magazines and on the web. Bruce Whealton is also here on Wikipedia and onWordopedia: Bruce Whealton
Education
‘Bruce Whealton attended the Georgia Institute of Technology and received his Bachelors Degree in Electrical/computer Engineering in 1989. Bruce went on to receive his Masters in Social Work from the University of South Carolina in 1996.
Career and Professional Information
Bruce has combined his interest in technical matters with his creativity as expressed in efforts such as this poetry magazine, his own poetry, and as a Web Developer/Designer. Bruce Whealton is the owner of Future Wave Designs, a successful web development, web design and consulting company in Carrboro, North Carolina, near Chapel Hill, NC in the Triangle Area of North Carolina – the Research Triangle area.
Poetry
Bruce Whealton”’ began to think of himself as a poet beginning back in 1992, when he shared his poetry at a poetry reading for the first time. This was at the Coastline Convention Center overlooking the Cape Fear River, in Wilmington, NC. He began Word Salad as an online poetry magazine in 1995.
You can read blogs by Bruce Whealton: http://brucewhealton.us and On Being a Poet and Other Existential Ideas: Bruce Whealton
Publications and Recognition
- Bruce Whealton can be found featured on the Port City Poets section of the Star News Online, as seen here.
- Bruce Whealton has been publishing Word Salad Poetry Magazine since 1995, with the magazine being in its sixteenth year in 2010.
- Bruce Whealton was featured in “‘The Simple Vows Anthology” with his poem Genealogy.
- More links to where Bruce Whealton has been published are available here on Word Salad’s website.
- Four Poems by Bruce Whealton appeared in “And Now the Nightmare Begins: The Horror Zine,” Rivers of Blood, I Dreamed I was A Ghost, and The Name.\
- Four Poems by Bruce Whealton appeared in “Twice the Terror: The Horror Zine,” Sensuous and Strong as the Serpent, Shelter, Becoming, Post Traumatic Stress Disorder
video Bruce Whealton, Word Salad Poetry Magazine, Poetry Event – bruce whealton, word salad poetry magazine, poetry magazine – videos Tom’s Hardware
Interesting place to find a video that was for Word Salad’s aniversary event. I am the publisher and co-editor of Word Salad Poetry Magazine and I do the Word Salad Online: http://WordSaladPoetryMagazine.com
http://facebook.com/WordSaladPoetry
Powerset
Unlock Meaning
Powerset finds articles related to the meaning of your query. And sometimes even direct answers.
via powerset.com
A more intelligent way to search. This tool uses natural language processing to allow you to more accurately and flexibly search wikipedia. It seems that they took wikipedia as an example website application they could use to test their ideas. It is fun to use and very handy.
Resource Description Framework (RDF)
RDF is a W3C standard for modeling and sharing distributed knowledge based on a decentralized open-world assumption. Any knowledge about anything can be decomposed into triples (3-tuples) consisting of subject, predicate, and object; essentially, RDF is the lowest common denominator for exchanging data between systems.
This module provides comprehensive RDF functionality and interoperability for the Drupal 6.x platform. For more information, read the introductory posting or watch the demo video. Be sure to subscribe to the Semantic Web group on groups.drupal.org to keep up with the latest happenings.
The module requires PHP 5.2 or newer, makes use of the ARC2 library if available, and will integrate with the Views, FeedAPI, Feed Element Mapper, Location, and Services modules if they are installed. For adding SPARQL query support, see the related SPARQL project.
Projects that rely on this module as a dependency include Calais, File Framework, FeedAPI RDF and the Relations and DAV APIs and their spin-offs such as File Relations Server.
This project is being developed by Arto Bendiken, Miglius Alaburda, Ben Lavender, Jeff Miccolis, Frank Febbraro and Stéphane Corlosquet. Development has been in part sponsored by OpenBand and MakaluMedia.
Downloads
Recommended releases
Version Downloads Date Links 6.x-1.0-alpha7 Download (63.71 KB) 2009-Mar-25 Notes Development releases
Version Downloads Date Links 6.x-1.x-dev Download (66.22 KB) 2010-Jul-11 Notes
via drupal.org
This is the future of the web. Companies, organizations and individuals who take advantage of these technologies will be more competitive and be able to take advantage of the benefits. RDF is part of the semantic web. Semantics is about meaning. I’ve been writing about how most content on the web is not setup in a way that has meaning that can be understood by web agents, by machines, computer, the software that makes up the web. So, web services, in most cases, until they implement these changes, have no idea what the meaning is contained in the content, the data on the web.
As I mentioned in another post, we can take google and how it does a search. We might ask a question of google but it is just looking for the keywords in the question mean. With the semantic web which is being slowly implemented by Google and moreso by Yahoo, the search engine will understand the phrases we use – the language we use, the meaning in our questions. So, if you have a search that includes the word apple, it will look at the context and know whether you are talking about a fruit or the software company. This usually isn’t a problem because other words (keywords) in our search usually help to increase the likelihood that we will find something related to what we are searching. We won’t get a site that has information about the fruit if we search for apple software. Those two words help target the results.
This did become a problem problem recently for me when I was looking for a place called Digsby. I got page after page about the social chat application (it does more than chat/IM). I tried to tell my search engine, not to give me results that have anything to do with software, or computers… it did not work. The semantic web would help with this.
Google Rolls out Semantic Search Capabilities – PCWorld Business Center
via pcworld.com
So, Google will beincreasingly able to understand the meaning of the phrases and questions you put into the search engine. This is new. For the most part, when you put a question into google, it looks for a set of keywords that are grouped together and include the words in your question. For example, asking Google What is the capital of New York will result in Google searching for websites that have the words capital and new york in them – using the old keyword only way of searching and indexing the web. That is different than Google actually understanding the question. So, when we talk about google or a search engine understanding the question or phrase presented to it, that is something new.
Yahoo is actually ahead of this and is using the code that is inside a webpage to help it understand the meaning in the webpage content that it is indexing. Go to http://www.opencalais.com to learn about how you can improve your website for the semantic web and help others to find you.
Bruce Whealton
Semantic search – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopediaJump to: navigation, searchseeks to improve by understanding searcher intent and the contextual meaning of terms as they appear in the searchable dataspace, whether on the Web or within a closed system, to generate more relevant results. lists “11 approaches that join semantics to search”[1], and Hildebrand et al. [2] provide an overview that lists and identifies other uses of semantics in the .
Guha et al.[3] distinguish two major forms of search: Navigational and Research. In , the user is using the as a to navigate to a particular intended document. Semantic Search is not applicable to navigational searches. In Research Search, the user provides the with a phrase which is intended to denote an object about which the user is trying to gather/research information. There is no particular document which the user knows about that s/he is trying to get to. Rather, the user is trying to locate a number of documents which together will give him/her the information s/he is trying to find. Semantic Search lends itself well here.
Rather than using ranking algorithms such as ‘s to predict relevancy, Semantic Search uses semantics, or the science of meaning in language, to produce highly relevant . In most cases, the goal is to deliver the information queried by a user rather than have a user sort through a list of loosely related keyword results.
Other authors primarily regard as a set of techniques for retrieving knowledge from richly structured data sources like ontologies as found on the Semantic Web [4]. Such technologies enable the formal articulation of domain knowledge at a high level of expressiveness and could enable the user to specify his intent in more detail at query time.
[edit] Disambiguation
In order to understand what a user is searching for, word sense disambiguation must occur. When a term is ambiguous, meaning it can have several meanings (for example, if one considers the lemma “bark“, which can be understood as “the sound of a dog,” “the skin of a tree,” or “a three-masted sailing ship”), the disambiguation process is started, thanks to which the most probable meaning is chosen from all those possible.
Such processes make use of other information present in a semantic analysis system and takes into account the meanings of other words present in the sentence and in the rest of the text. The determination of every meaning, in substance, influences the disambiguation of the others, until a situation of maximum plausibility and coherence is reached for the sentence. All the fundamental information for the disambiguation process, that is, all the knowledge used by the system, is represented in the form of a , organized on a conceptual basis.
In a structure of this type, every lexical concept coincides therefore with a node and is linked to others by specific semantic relationships in a hierarchical and hereditary structure. In this way, each concept is enriched with the characteristics and meaning of the nearby nodes.
Every node of the network (called Synset) groups a set of synonyms which represent the same lexical concept (called Synsets) and can contain:
- single lemmata (‘seat’, ‘vacation’; ‘work’, ‘quick’; ‘quickly’, ‘more’, etc.)
- compounds (‘non-stop’, ‘abat-jour’, ”)
- collocations (‘credit card’, ‘university degree’, ‘treasury stock’, ‘go forward’, etc.).
The semantic relationships (links), which identify the semantic relationships between the synsets, are the order principals for the organization of the concepts.
[edit] See also
[edit] References
Several scientific events cover the topic of explicitly, such as the Semantic Search 2008 Workshop at ESWC’08 and the Workshop on Exploiting Semantic Annotations in Information Retrieval at ECIR’08.
[show] Semantic Web
[show] Internet search Retrieved from “http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_search“
via en.wikipedia.org
Semantic Search offers more intelligent searching of the web. This is great for research or finding what is out on the web when you don’t already know what you want or are seeking. This is the web 3.0, the semantic web about which I have been writing recently. Semantics deals with the science of meaning in language. As a writer, poet and technology person, I find this very fascinating.
Bruce Whealton
The Cara Program: Case Study
Founded in 1991, The Cara Program is a Chicago-based non-profit that empowers men and women affected by homelessness and poverty with the skills, confidence and resources to secure and sustain quality jobs and achieve long-term success. Since their founding, they have placed more than 2,500 individuals into full-time, rewarding positions with leading Chicago area companies such as ABM Lakeside, The Hilton Hotels, JP Morgan Chase, Sodexho, and more.
The Cara Program sought a redesign of their static website, one that engaged visitors by quickly delivering key information that was clear and concise, and could be easily maintained by Cara staff. Being a non-profit website, they also needed a way to accept donations, recruit volunteers, allow visitors to join their mailing list, and recruit sponsors and employment partners. In addition to being able to simply accept donations, they wanted to eventually “empower” donors to use social media and/or other outlets to spread the word, champion their cause and help others donate or otherwise support. The ability to share some content also needed to be a feature on The Cara Program “child” program websites: Clean Slate, Quad Communities and Career Pathways.
Duo Consulting was chosen to implement their goals and Drupal was the platform chosen.
Why Drupal?
Drupal was the platform of choice because it provided the features and functionality the Cara Program desired, and integrated with CiviCRM, a free, open source CRM and their current source of event management.
Design and Architecture Direction
When we approached the new architecture for The Cara Program, we knew there would be some challenges. On the old site, it took a lot of reading and scrolling before you could understand a program’s purpose, and what it did for the students. We needed to tell the story of The Cara Program concisely, so that new users could orient themselves to the program and partner programs without having to wade through 2 pages of content. We also needed to allow users to take a deep dive into detailed information when it was relevant to their search.
The solution we came up with involved simplifying the main navigation into 3 main buckets: a discovery bucket for users looking to find out what The Cara Program is and what it does (What We Do); a metric bucket for users wanting to know the effectiveness and reach of the program through statistics and explanations (The Impact), and finally, a call to action bucket for users looking to get involved (What You Can Do).
Within each bucket, we wanted to provide two tracks for accessing information. The first track was the fast track for users skimming the website. This included short one-to-two sentence overviews, without page refreshing. The second track was integrated into the first track, so when a user found the category relevant to their research, they were given an option to read more about that topic and dive deep into the content. This content strategy allowed users who skim information to skim more effectively, and those doing in-depth research to easily access full pages of information.
We attended motivations, met volunteers, and toured classrooms. One theme from all of our experiences is that The Cara Program was all about movement: movement to get your attention, movement to take your life in a new positive direction, movement to make a difference today.
We were inspired to make sure the site design captured the energy and movement of everyone involved. We went to work on UI patterns like the infinite image scroller on the homepage, attracting the user with vibrant imagery. Video and events weren’t buried on an internal page; they expanded to a full frame on the homepage. We also placed the private and commercial donors into a ticket stream on the bottom of each page, to show how their contributions help keep the program running.
Functionality
Homepage
The homepage slideshow is controlled by 2 Views (well, 1 View with 2 block displays); one that displays the 3 scrolling images shown with Semantic Views (so we could easily control the markup, which can become an issue when using custom JavaScript), and another that displays the global text in the top left area. The scrolling effect is all frontend, created using some jQuery/JavaScript niceness.
The 3 sections immediately below the scrolling images are controlled by a View, which displays a nodequeue of “homepage spotlight” content.. Content added to the queue can have a scheduled publish or unpublished date, allowing for automatic promotion or demotion. Each display style has a particular taxonomy term associated with it. Depending on which term you select, the output will be styled to match. A video will display the play button with custom text, an event will display the enlarged date, and announcements will display the map of Chicago. Clicking on either one of those items replaces the scrolling images with the content from that item (again, some jQuery/JavaScript niceness).The scrolling ticker in the footer area is a list view, which is modified to scroll using the front end.
Inner Pages
The inner pages generally follow one of three formats:
- Tabbed display of teaser content below the main navigation
- Display of image below the main navigation and links in the sidebar
- Menu Block display only (no image or content below main navigation)
To help accomplish this, all content is categorized by the section in which it appears (“what we do”, “the impact” etc). A page may also contain a secondary tag, which is useful for other reasons. Depending on what “section” you are in (or menu path or both), content will be displayed differently.
Clicking on any of the 3 main links at the top takes you to a page that displays a View using the Tabs display, showing the teaser of the first 3-5 items in that section (see note on displaying content for someone skimming the website). Clicking the “learn more” link takes you to a page with no image or content below main navigation, but 4-6 links to other pages within that menu, which in turn are created using the Menu Block module.
Clicking on any content in the “About” section (content in the About Us menu) takes you to a page that displays an image, which has been assigned to the same “section” as the page below the main navigation. This gives you the option toadd a unique image for each page in the “About” section.
Key Modules
For the Drupal pros out there, here are some of the key modules we used for the site:
CiviCRM
CiviCRM was chosen because in our experience, organizations with needs like The Cara Program’s benefitted greatly from a CRM solution, as opposed to a few forms that just capture data. CiviCRM provided the ability to easily create custom forms that collected various types of information from collected data group volunteers, sponsors, donors, and mailing list subscribers, and track all activities (follow up phone calls, appointments, meeting, email, snail mail) with those persons. Custom reports on this data could then be generated be exported in various formats, for potential import into desktop applications. It also provided the ability to potentially enable personal campaign pages, so donors could spearhead donation drives and we could provide them with the ability to embed donation widgets on their website.
Domain Access
This was allowed all four sites to share the same codebase, database and some of the same content, which meant new features enabled on one website were immediately available to all others, and upgrades and modifications to Drupal and/or contrib. modules only needed to happen once.
Honorable Module Mentions
Context: Used primarily to set theme variables when in certain “sections” of site.
Views (of course).
CCK (of course).
via drupal.org
This site uses the Drupal Content Management System. I am currently setting up a Drupal site for Neighbor House of Hillsborough – we serve the homeless and needy in northern orange county, NC. The Cara Program serves the homeless in Chicago. I look forward to learning about how they are using the software to reach their goals and become successful. Read about them… Please become a fan of us on facebook here: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Neighbor-House-of-Hillsborough/141458569206184
We need more fans to get a custom url.
Bruce