Internet, Social Media & Volunteering (Part I)

A few months ago the board of Volonteurope has accepted my proposal for its 19^th conference this year in Athens. Just like I’ve already done it for my infoshop for the Lebenshilfe at castle Rauischholzhausen earlier this year, I’ll prepare for this presentation via my blog. Of course not only to improve my written English! Following the feedback from last years participants, Piotr Sadowski (the Volonteurope General Secretary) asked me, and (hopefully) all the other presenters, to raise the interactivity of the ‘master classes’. I’ll do so and I will give the chance to all of you to interact already during my preparations …
Let’s get on in:
I think as a first step to get into the theme “Internet, Social Media & Volunteering” we should talk about what exactly we’re talking about. We must talk about the Internet as one part, then we take a deeper look at Social Media and finally we want to know how we can use this ‘new technology’ for our work with volunteers and even how to improve voluntarism at all.
Fortunately it is not necessary that I explain the history of the Internet or the idea of the so called ‘Web 2.0’ and Social Media. Other people have done this in a more visual way before. That’s why I decided to compose a variety of videos and animations from which I point some important facts out.
At first we will take a look at the history of the Internet. This video is round about eight minutes long and begins with the first usable computers in 1957.
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9hIQjrMHTv4] From this video I think we can point out the following facts:

• The Internet is not generally the result of a military project called ARPAnet. Already the term “Internet” is the result of the development in France — not the United States. Furthermore the data protection system in the USA weren’t thinkable without the technical development before.
• Because of technical problems and the idea of knowledge management decentralised computer networks like the ARPAnet were developed.
• All in one the history of the Internet is a history of solving different problems and the history of combining various approaches worldwide.

After the hardware of ARPAnet was removed in 1990 not only the Internet goes on. Its development goes on too. Sir Tim Berners-Lee published his program markup language HTML and the World Wide Web, the Internet as we know, was born.
The next video is a production of Commoncraft, a small company in Seattle – Washington – USA that motto is “our product is explanation”. Commoncraft is publishing very good videos “in plain English” which are free to use (CC-Licence). Please watch also one of the other 30 videos of Commoncraft at youtube.com.
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wZoMbBzqxyc] Important facts in this video were:

• The whole World Wide Web is, like the Internet before, about decentralised data and driven by different protocols — we don’t really need to know exactly how it works.
• But: What we need to realise is that millions of servers with billions and billions of web pages are findable via their URLs. That is why we have to push our websites via linking and linking and linking …
  
• „Information of the whole world can reach our computer.” Contrariwise: All our information we load up to the Internet, can reach people from all over the world

The rest of the WWW history is proposed quickly: After Berners-Lee published his Hypertext Markup Language more and more websites were published. In the graph below you can see that the development was nearly exponential. With browser programs the Internet got usable for everyone — not only for scientists and experts. More and more companies published an own website and tried to sell various products. The World Wide Web was seen as the next big market place and because of that temporally, this is what it’s growing up to.


So far and no further about the history of Internet and the “Web 1.0”, like Tim O’Reilly named it in 2005. In the next post we will take a look at the social part of the Internet. I use the expression “social part” because the other parts of Internet aren’t gone. All the thoughts I pointed out in this post still exist next to the new social part. The decentralised data transfer between computers still is the core of the Internet. Even if we don’t have to understand exactly how it works — the TCP/IP is just as important as in the first days of the Internet and without web browsers we couldn’t use any Social Media tool.