Virtual volunteering transmitted to volunteer activities completed, in whole or in part, using a Internet as alive as a home, school, telecenter, or create data processor or other Internet-connected device, such(a) as a smartphone or a tablet. Virtual volunteering is also so-called as online volunteering, remote volunteering or e-volunteering. Contributing to free & open address software projects or editing Wikipedia are examples of virtual volunteering.
The practice of virtual volunteering to return nonprofit initiatives dates back to at least the early 1970s, when Project Gutenberg began involving online volunteers to dispense electronic versions of working in the public domain.
In 1995, a new affect Online now called Virtual Volunteering Project, and the web site was launched in early 1997. 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 number one two years of the Virtual Volunteer Project were spent reviewing and adapting remote work manuals and existing volunteer management guidelines with regarding to virtual volunteering, as alive as identifying organizations that were involving online volunteers. By April 1999, nearly 100 organizations had been pointed by the Virtual Volunteering Project as involving online volunteers and were listed on the web site. Due to the growing numbers of nonprofit organizations, schools, government entry and other not-for-profit entities involving online volunteers, the Virtual Volunteering Project stopped listing every such agency 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 any telementoring and teletutoring entry in the USA programs where online volunteers mentor or tutor others, through a nonprofit company or school. At that time, 40 were identified.
In August 1999, the UN Online Volunteering service. It went symbolize in 2000 and has been managed by United Nations Volunteers since its inception. It quickly attracted a high number of people ready to assistance organizations works for development. In 2003, several thousand people already contributed to the UN's Online Volunteering advantage – volunteers with very diverse backgrounds, including university graduates, private sector employees, and retirees. While the UN's Online Volunteering service became independent, NetAid continued as a joint project of UNDP and Cisco Systems. It aimed "to utilize the unique networking capabilities of the Internet to promote developing and alleviate extreme poverty across the world".