Cybervolunteers / Cibervoluntarios

[Yolanda Rueda Fernandez]

The cybervolunteers (Cibervoluntarios) are volunteers who help Cibervoluntarios Foundation (www.cibervoluntarios.org) to conduct its activities. They are volunteer staff who are passionate about new technologies, supportive, who offer part of their time and knowledge to teach other people how to use technology tools and applications in order to improve their lives. The Cibervoluntarios Foundation everyday helps the 1,500 cybervolunteers to carry out their task. How? We provide some examples below:

 

• By coordinating activities of training in the use of technology tools with other associations (women, seniors, disabled, neighborhood associations, rural areas…)
• By training the cybervolunteers on how to work with these focus groups, teaching them social skills, communication and even the use of specific technical tools (especially in the cases of people with disabilities).
• By coordinating several cybervolunteers who will go together to a same activity, for them to know each other so they will be able to work as a team.
• By getting the space and technical resources to develop an activity.
• By assuring each cybervolunteers in the development of the activities.
• By offering them materials and resources so they can better carry out their labor.
• By paying them the travel expenses and any other expensed incurred in the voluntary development of their activity.
• By encouraging them to generate their own training projects and citizen empowerment programs through ICTs so other colleagues can join.
• By facilitating the organization of activities where they can develop their passion and their activity as technology volunteer.
• By helping them to develop a follow up and continuity with the target group online, after having removed the digital divide in face-to-face activities.

 

In short, the cybervolunteers help the Foundation to develop its everyday labor; it would not have been possible to have reached more than fifty thousand people through our existence without them. They are the leitmotiv of our organization and we are working for them to encourage the innovation and social change in society through the ICTs. In short, the Cybervolunteers are social change agents, aware of the power of new technologies to cause this change and empower people.

 

To do this we conform and adapt a variety of applications, tools and technological contents to the social, professional, educational and cultural needs of each of the groups for which technologies represent the distinctive feature that helps them to empower themselves; this is to say, to increase their capacities and opportunities within their environment. So our actions are highlighted by social innovation, by the use of new tools to solve old problems in a different way, because new technologies should not create more gaps, but to help eliminate the existing ones. 

More info: www.cibervoluntarios.org

[e-mail]

@cibervoluntario

www.facebook.com/cibervoluntarios

www.flickr.com/cibervoluntarios

www.youtube.com/cibervoluntarios

Telf. [phone]

[Andy Parks]

Yolanda, gracais por la información sobre tu organización. Me imagino que hay muchas personas en España que quieren aprovecharse de esa formación que les ofrece Cibervoluntarios. ¿Pueden personas de otros paises participar y ser cibervoluntarios, o solo de España?

 

English: Can people outside of Spain participate and be cybervolunteers?