Mike Wenger '09 is working to bring social networking to the volunteer community. With a team of Colgate students, faculty, and alumni, Wenger is creating www.collaboraid.org, a website that will help volunteers, nonprofit organizations, and indigenous stakeholders collaborate online.
The site is Wenger's solution to a problem he uncovered when volunteering in Africa over two summers. He observed that despite best intentions and the proximity of aid organizations, they don't always have the means to share information, often leading to a duplication of efforts.
"I realized there are a lot of collaborative opportunities missed out on," Wenger said.
Additionally, he noticed that when short-term volunteers arrive in a country, they spend unnecessary time getting their bearings and trying to ascertain where best to spend their resources.
"I saw a lot of projects that failed because they weren't supported by the local community, and a log of people reinventing the wheel," he said.
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Mike Wenger '09 is leading a team of Colgate community members that is bringing social networking to the volunteer community. (Photo by Janna Minehart '13)
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From talking to other volunteers and members of nonprofit organizations, he learned that others also believe that valuable time and resources are being wasted because of the lack of easily accessible information on projects and communities.
In the early stages, Wenger wanted to ensure
that there wasn't a similar site in existence and that people would be
interested in participating, so he sent screen shots demonstrating the
community's functionality to various nonprofit organizations and indigenous
stakeholders in developing countries.
Based on positive feedback, the site has evolved,
and the team is working on tools such as profile pages, mapping, and video
conferencing.
As Wenger and the team work to get the site off the ground, they're gaining good traction. In July, CollaborAid won $10,000 in a monthly online voting competition sponsored by IdeaBlob, a site for entrepreneurs and small business owners.
In August, Wenger and co-founder Kaitlyn Godfrey '09 presented CollaborAid at the National Collegiate Inventors and Innovators Alliance Conference in Cambridge, Mass., where they received overwhelming support.
"People said, [this] website would help us overcome some of the barriers to information we have based in the United States; this would be a resource we would use to implement our projects more effectively," explained Godfrey, CollaborAid's executive vice president.
While waiting for their 501(c)(3) nonprofit application to be approved, the CollaborAid team is gathering endorsements and spreading the word in order to populate the website before it launches.
They plan to reach out to technology partners and ask for in-kind donations to help build the site. And because Internet service can be unreliable in developing countries, Wenger said that they hope to partner with organizations that are providing computer labs and training.
Within the next year, they plan to roll out a beta test version for a specific geographic area that has Internet penetration and a large aid population. The global launch will be within the next year and a half to two years.