Seek and You Shall Find Either Assistance or Someone to Assist:

Seek and you shall find either assistance or someone to assist:

A recent study by the Pew Internet and American Life project suggests that the Internet is leading people to interact less often with the significant people in their lives. This may be true, but the Internet not only isolates people, it also brings them together. In fact, the Internet provides people with new opportunities to help their fellow human beings.

According to the University of Texas’s ServiceLeader (www.serviceleader.org) website, “Virtual volunteering means volunteer tasks completed, in whole or in part, via the Internet and a home or work computer.” Distributed Proofreading, described above, is obviously one example of volunteerism on the ‘net, and there are many other examples of people using technology in innovative ways to make the world a better place. Here are some of them:

Random Acts of Genealogical Kindness (http://www.raogk.org/)
Over 4000 volunteers have each pledged to do one genealogical research task per month on behalf of someone else. Check the web site for complete details.

The Hunger Site (http://www.thehungersite.com/)
If you click on a designated link on this page, site sponsors donate 1.1 cups of “staple food” to those in need. It sounds too good to be true, but the web’s major debunkers of urban legends (Snopes and Truth or Fiction.com) attest to the site’s legitimacy (http://www.truthorfiction.com/rumors/t/thehungersite.htm and (http://www.snopes.com/inboxer/charity/hungersite.asp).

Global Ideas Bank (http://www.globalideasbank.org/)
This site bills itself as a “global suggestion box for socially innovative, non-technological ideas and projects, with £1,000 UK sterling awards annually for the best ideas or projects submitted.” You can send your own world-changing ideas to this site (two sample ideas from the site: the establishment of “laughing clubs” where the grumpy could to engage in mood-improving “laugh therapy;” and the promotion of “rooftop gardening” to beautify large cities and reduce global warming), or read and vote on ideas already submitted.


American Civil Liberties Union (www.aclu.org)
The ACLU (www.aclu.org) is just one example of an advocacy group that makes it easy for ordinary citizens to express their political views. In the Legislative Update section of its web site, the organization describes upcoming legislation and the ACLU’s position on it. If you care to contact your senators, you can e-mail them directly from the web site, using either a pre-written letter or your own text. On the right wing, Concerned Women for America (www.cwfa.org) offers the same service. In fact, it looks like these two diametrically opposed organizations are running the same software.

Peer to Peer Programs
You may have heard recently that a new candidate for “largest known prime number” has been identified--it’s 6,320,430 digits long and would need 1,400-1,500 pages to write out. But did you hear how this “Mersenne prime” was found? Over 200,000 computers took part in a worldwide project that essentially linked them into one supercomputer that performed calculations while the computer owners did other things. This is an example of the power of peer to peer software programs. Once the software is installed, it runs in the background—as you do your word processing, web surfing, or whatever, the software runs through its processes. They say you don’t even notice it. And if your do need additional computing power, the background program takes a nap until you’re done.

If you want your home computer to participate in the advancement of science, Intel offers a gateway to such projects at http://www.intel.com/cure/.

Volunteer Match (http://www.volunteermatch.org/virtual/)
If you want to be a “virtual volunteer,” this site will match you with non-profit organizations that offer online opportunities.

Preserving Western Civilization—One Page at a Time

You’ve probably heard of Project Gutenberg, the web’s original, and still the largest, preserve of free (public domain) electronic books. But what you may not know is that you, too, can be part of this massive undertaking, without making a large monetary or time commitment. All you have to do is go to http://www.pgdp.net/c/default.php and volunteer your services as a proofreader for the Distributed Proofreading project. Participants in this project proofread literary works before they are added to the Project Gutenberg database. I’ve been part of the project for two weeks now, and I can tell you, it’s easy, relaxing and even fun.

This Distributed Proofreading is not as much of a drag as regular proofreading can be sometimes. For one thing, you can select the works you want to look at, and do as many or few pages as you want. For another, all you’re doing is comparing the scanned version to the original page image, and making corrections directly on the scanned version, so there’s no need to know proofreading symbols or to look up grammar rules or proper spelling. The one important rule is that you are not to change the author’s words or intent, and the only annoyance is that once you finish a page and ask for a new one, you don’t necessarily get the next page in sequence in the book.

In my brief two weeks as a DP’er, I’ve risen through the ranks from “newbie” to “ace” (as of this writing, I’ve read 176 pages; the project champion has done over 80,000), and I’ve proofread pages from many diverse works such as19th century novels, both famous (The Bostonians) and forgotten (The Green Mouse), histories of Western philosophy and Bohemian literature, a tract against slavery in the British colonies, a biography of proto-feminist Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, a medieval play in which all the characters were birds and frogs, and even some of the writings of visionary crackpot Emanuel Swedenborg. Most of this material I never would have picked up otherwise.

So, if you have time on your hands as the winter winds blow, I encourage you to give Distributed Proofreading a try. You’ll get a chance to look at some literature you’ll never find at a popular materials library, and you’ll be contributing to the preservation of these works at the same time.

Peace on Earth, etc. etc.

During the holiday season, one’s thoughts often turn to helping one’s fellow members of humanity. This issue of Net News will focus on the altruistic side of the wired world, especially ways Internet provides opportunities to do good for the people you know—and for the people you’ll never meet in this life.