Vol4All: A Volunteering Platform to Drive Innovation and Citizens Empowerment

Cities nowadays have embraced the digital era and continuously strive to merge technological advancements with the benefit of their social capital and communities. A major quest is to place humans and their competences at the center of the efforts towards sustainable and smart cities. Citizen societies have widely accepted and practiced volunteering for years now and already a great number of volunteering actions and networks have flourished, in support and aid to several communities in need. Most popular volunteering networks have greatly capitalized on the rapid advance and spread of Internet and Web technologies, which are ideal for coordinating and monitoring of the volunteering tasks. The Vol4All platform advances this trend, by building on extended Internet technologies in its aim to support citizens’ activism towards novel urban social innovation. Vol4All enables ideas exchange and crowdsourcing by facilitating citizens’ involvement in the realization of community projects. Volunteering actors (initiators, participants, stakeholders) can easily interact via the Vol4All platform which enables volunteering opportunities dynamic sharing, evolution and monitoring. Such opportunities can be initiated by any authorized stakeholders, with a publicly open interface which allows citizens commitment assessment, best practices highlights, and a gamification style of interaction such that volunteering becomes a societal and growth asset.