Connect the volunteer to the media sphere!

For this week’s blog post, I will be tackling my own research interest which isn’t conclusive so far since I have several ideas in mind but for the sake of this blog post, will be focusing on one of them.

Having both a public health background and a volunteering background in the youth department in a public non-profit organization under the umbrella of an international movement, I am interested in working on a project which involves young people. In line with that, I thought of working on both volunteer management and communication within the youth department of the non-profit organization in which I was a volunteer.

The youth department of that organization has 35 centers across Lebanon, yet centers do not really know what other centers are working on and so I thought of relying on an App in Open Lab which involves video filming as a way to have centers document their projects and share them among each other. Additionally, this same App could be used within projects as a tool to enable young people targeted by the projects run by the centers to express their concerns and thoughts, as such giving insights to those organizing projects on what to include in future projects or it can even be used to capture feedback.  Moreover, I thought of using Event App to support in volunteer management and even support in organizing events for each center and centers might even share events between each other. Finally, if Gabber could potentially be translated into Arabic, I think it might contribute somehow as a feedback mechanism but also as a way for young people engaged in projects to express through it and maybe report issues. The whole idea of this project is still not very clear for me and it might not be my MRes project since as I mentioned I have other ideas which I need to explore further but thought to share this one as it is a bit more structured than the rest.

In order to start off my exploration of the literature, I selected the paper Managing technology use and learning in non-profit community organizations: methodological challenges and opportunities  because as the title clearly states, this paper examines three case studies of non-profit community organizations and their experience with technology focusing on scenario development, technology inventory assessment, and volunteer management practices.

The second purpose of this blog post is to share some notes about Alex Bowyer’s research interest. Alex is interested in exploring usefulness versus usability of technology. He is really keen on the idea of “programming for the environment” and as such wants to have a deeper insight on barriers to technology which hinder the users’ experiences and to understand the current technological infrastructure. Based on that and an exploratory study he is willing to undertake, he is interested in developing a technology which supports in overcoming identified barriers to technology but needs to frame it within a civic matter which he still needs to identify.

As such, I managed to find the paper Why do people use information technology? A critical review of the technology acceptance model which could be of relevance to Alex’s interests since it explores the Technology Acceptance Model with a critical lens. I believe this paper could be a starting point for Alex since it examines the theoretical aspect of usability and usefulness of technology and the lessons extrapolated from this paper can inspire Alex’s future research in that field.