Project description
Click here to read the project's history first

The goal of the project is to gather active people in an open social network. We would like to link not only organic farms and rural projects, but also volunteers, activists, urban communities, non-profit organizations and other kind of groups which build on an open philosophy and works towards a sustainable future. The main point that all these have in common is not to be searching for financial or material profit, but for the long-term well being of communities. The project is inspired by many other successful virtural networks such as :

• Wwoof
  
• Idealist
  
• Care2
  
• BeWelcome
  
• Couchsurfing
  
• Myspace
  
• Facebook

We consider that all of these projects, although being useful in their own context, cannot replace a network such as Voluntera in terms of the links it would provide. This network would allow small and independant groups that are looking for collaborators (but that miss the means), to know more about their neighbors. The ultimate goal of such a Network would be to get people in contact for real exchange and concrete activities, leading to a positive change in the habits of a community. In addition, none of the projects above combines the all of the qualities that we would like to see in Voluntera, such as:

• Dynamic multilingual platform;
  
• Priority to open and free software;
  
• Non-profit, non-commercial vision;
  
• Large span of subjects related to individual and community well being;
  
• User friendly interface;
  
• Totally free of charge;
  
• Efficient search engine.

I am currently working on the Beta version of the Voluntera network. It should be available online in 2009, hopefully in february. If you would like to share ideas and resources for this project, don't hesitate to contact me.

History
During the summer of 2005, me and my sister lived a work-for-accomodation experience in a farm in rural Costa Rica. To find the farm, we used the Wwoof network. The experience was great, enlightening. On the other hand, we felt that Wwoof's web system was unefficient in many ways. Here are some of the things we noticed

• Browsing on the site is not user-friendly;
  
• The site is only in english;
  
• They charge money to access the farms' information, per country and per year;
  
• It is not possible to leave a comment about an experience that would be seen by the other users;
  
• The organization is not clearly open-oriented..

Theses gaps made us think of developing a new project that would, according to our criterias, do better. We then started a project named The Contact Center. This project now takes a new name: Voluntera.