Bright Works has been shortlisted as one of the best 12 volunteering  projects on the Web as part of the Discover E-Volunteering competition.

You can read descriptions of the finalists here and choose the projects that you think are the most valuable and deserve the financial prize to further their development.

Here's a step-by-step on how to vote and what the Bright Works entry looks like (just so you know which one to vote for, of course...)

1. Visit the Discover E-volunteering competition voting page.

2. Click on the Bright Works image:

3. Enter your email address

4. Click on the 'Vote' button

5. All done!

You can vote for us every day starting from October 14th to November 3rd, so make sure you set a daily reminder to vote for Bright Works :)

The official announcement of the winners of the Competition will take place in December 2011 during the Final Gala in Warsaw, so we'll make sure to keep you updated on the results.

Get voting now >>

Bright Works has been featured in an article on Social Innovation Europe, looking at how microvolunteering via ICT is becoming a reality in the UK:

Engaging with the people you want to help and spreading the word on how you’re changing the world is vital for any social venture. However, many small, third sector organisations are suffering as a result of the current economic climate, with a worsening situation looking likely for following the public sector funding cuts. The Media Trust publication ‘The Marketing and Communication Needs of Charities’ highlighted the importance and the danger of organisations not getting their message across, with issues ranging from lacking a coherent strategy, to simply lacking a budget for marketing and communication.

It’s a problem – how can social ventures maintain their profile, raise funds and communicate with their audiences in the current economic situation? Step forward Bright One – a volunteer run communications agency for social ventures. Bright One offers charities an affordable way to review and implement a PR and communications strategy to help them to weather this difficult financial period and maximise their limited resources. Their services include media relations, press release creation and distribution, copywriting, monitoring and evaluation, social media and digital PR and event planning. All those things that help turn a good idea into a venture with real impact.

In addition, the team have also launched a web app, BrightWorks, a micro-volunteering app for charity tasks where volunteers can create tasks and others can claim them.

Read the whole article over on Social Innovation Europe.

There are naturally features, processes or ideas that you don't account for when in the planning stages, but when you launch your MVP to the world it is then that your first users start to point out where the platform could be improved and what features they'd like to see.

So, thanks to all of those who have been using the platform in these first few weeks (we broke the 100 registered user mark within the first few days and are growing steadily) and for all of the feedback you have given (P.S. our feedback form is always open for your comments).

We'e listened (and perhaps more importantly) acted upon your ideas, inspirations and basic requests, with the following features now put into place:

1. Allowing a user to “undo” the claiming of a task: Were you a bit too enthusiastic to take on a task, but now realise that you don't have time to complete it? Or did you simply slip on your mouse finger and accidentally claim a task? Well, never fear - task undo is here!

2. Ability to archive projects: Perhaps you're a charity who has had all of your current tasks completed. Great news! Bright Works has worked a treat for you. But now those tasks have been done, you don't have any more to be completed at this time. Now we can archive your project, so that volunteers don't see an empty project.

3. Ability to re-enable archived projects: But, if you do come up with some more tasks, we can bring back your project so you can start adding tasks again. Hooray!

4. Prevent deletion of done tasks: When a project is archived, this previously 'deleted' all tasks that were completed, which meant that it didn't count towards the total amount of tasks completed by the Bright Works community. That's now been changed, so that even if a project is archived, the completed tasks (and your vital work) still counts.

5. Addition of new icons: Last but not least, there's been a few tweaks to how Bright Works is represented across the range of devices that you might access it on. There’s a new placeholder icon for users and for projects, a “favicon” that will show up in your browser’s tab and browser bookmarks, and there’s a mobile device “app icon” that will show up, for example, when you save Bright Works as an iPhone or iPad home screen shortcut.

You may not even notice some of these improvements, but we're keen to show that we're rapidly iterating Bright Works and will constantly work to implement your feedback where possible. We'll keep you updated as further improvements are made, but feel free to let us know if there's a feature or idea that you'd like us to look at.

So keep the feedback coming and keep completing those tasks - your small actions with Bright Works will add up to big changes across our communities!

Volunteering consultant Rob Jackson has written a series on microvolunteering for Third Sector magazine, the latest taking a look at important considerations that need addressing if microvolunteering is going to truly be a valuable addition to a volunteer manager's toolbox.  

The two that Rob points to are Impacts and Opportunities:

Impact: Is the activity someone does waiting for a train just making them feel good about themselves or is it actually making a difference? I've raised this objection before. In response Help From Home published data on microvolunteering. But in my view that data is about outputs (what's been done) not impact (what difference has been made). At a time when charities are being told we need to demonstrate our impact more than ever, should we really be investing time and money in new initiatives like microvolunteering without good evidence of impact?

Opportunities: Meaningful and motivating volunteer opportunities are the key to great volunteering experiences and, as a result, more volunteering. If people enjoy giving time and feel they've made a difference they'll come back again and tell others about it. Organisations often struggle to create such opportunities that people can do in a few hours. Asking them to do this for roles that are completed in a few minutes is perhaps verging on the unrealistic. 

The comments are perhaps the best part of the article, with Damien Austin-Walker arguing that "what needs to be focused on now, and hopefully cracked, is how we create bite sized tasks that either have a beneficial impact in their own right or when performed a number of times or in conjunction with a number of other small tasks add up to a beneficial impact."

Adrian Barrott reminds us that besides the need to reach those who wouldn't have got involved in volunteering in the past, it is "equally important to ensure that the routes into all forms of volunteering work encourage the widest inclusion from across society."

Jayne Cravens cuts to what should be the core focus of current microvolunteering initiatives: about creating meaningful opportunities that lead to longer term social impact:

"If these microvolunteering promoters would focus on helping organizations create *meaningful* assignments, and helping organizations focus on engaging volunteers in micro assignments as a way to engage in large-scale cause awareness or to cultivate longer-term supporters, this movement truly would catch on. But as long as they keep only promoting it to people that they think want to do it, while thinking organizations will just magically create lots of assignments, and as long as they think of it as a way to change the world in five minutes while you are having a beer waiting for your flight (as Sparked.com used to promote the practice), it will remain a mere fad."

For us at BrightWorks, it's worth remembering that microvolunteering is still in a young stage (in its current technological format), so we hope to see rapid developments and iterations in the next few years. We'll see more advanced measurement of impacts (rather than outputs) and have more data to judge which are the best microvolunteering opportunities that organisations should be posting and how internal processes can be developed to help make microvolunteering a valuable part of an organisation's wider volunteering programme.

The scale of microvolunteering is also important, in that social impact might currently be relatively small. However, there is the potential for microvolunteering to capture an audience that might not normally be interested in 'traditional' volunteering and get them interested enough that they consider more in-depth (and perhaps more meaningful) volunteering in the longer term, thus microvolunteering can lead to creating a larger social impact.

Rob has added some great points to the impact and opportunities debate in microvolunteering, which we're looking forward to seeing it develop and for the various microvolunteering initiatives to take on board and address some of the sceptical points being argued.

The way we have designed BrightWorks allows for a natural process for tracking participants involvement. The most basic of these is when the volunteer and nonprofit complete the task without any input from us - the organisation posts their project and related tasks, the volunteers claims on of the tasks and then on completion they click "I've done it" and their completed task is counted. Each volunteer has a profile of how many and what tasks they've completed, which is currently behind the scenes at the moment, but we plan to develop this further. We also actively contact both volunteers and organisations periodically to ensure everyone is getting the support they need and finding value in the experience.

Are you running a project where people are helping others via the Internet? Then the ‘Discover e-volunteering’ Competition is just for you.

E-volunteering is volunteering conducted via the Internet (just like the microvolunteering that the BrightWorks community does).

Free web counseling, forming assistance and self-help groups, promoting partnerships, searching for information, or online language courses are among many examples of e-volunteering. Through this Competition, the organisers are hoping to show their diversity and to encourage all Europeans to undertake social activity over the Internet.

‘Discover e-volunteering’ is the only competition which aims at honouring and promoting the most interesting projects concerning the co-operation of non-governmental organizations with the e-voluntaries seeking to help others via the Internet. It has been also chosen by the European Commission as one of the flagship projects of the European Year of Volunteering 2011.

All organisations from the European Union cooperating with volunteers through the Internet may take part in the Competition.

The application form is available on the website: http://www.e-volunteering.eu/competition/

The deadline for submitting the applications is 31st July 2011, which means there are just 7 days left to enter the Competition.

If you enter the competition, we wish you good luck!

Our friends at Dharmafly, who have been hard at work creating an open source tool called “Tasket“ (the technology that powers BrightWorks) have written a post about the technical side of BrightWorks:

"BrightWorks uses a collection of HTML5-related technologies. It is a “thick client”, built with the JavaScript library Backbone.js, and communicates with a JSON-based API (e.g. here are all the unfinished tasks on BrightWorks). The server is created with the Python-based framework, Django (this may be swapped with Node.js in future).

Projects and tasks are laid out with force-directed physics, to prevent them from overlapping each other and the walls of the website. The lines connecting tasks are in SVG (although the circles that represent each project instead use simple CSS3 border-radius).

You can download the code and run it on your own server (it has the permissive MIT license), or fork the project on GitHub. Improvements and pull requests are welcome."

Dharmafly have even created a sandbox version for you to have a play with (in glorious black n’ white) at tasket.dharmafly.com

Go ahead, sign up, create a project, add some tasks. You can claim tasks that others have created, click around, explore. And remember, because it’s all open source, you can re-use the code for your own task management applications.

Want to know who the rather clever developers behind Tasket and BrightWorks are? Here's the full line up:

• Premasagar Rose - project lead
• Matt Weston – social design
• Gavin O’ Carroll – visual design
• Sym Roe – server-side
• Aron Carroll – JavaScript, CSS
• Kyran Dale – force-directed physics

However, we're also had a few people comment that they haven't been able to even view the site properly and just see a blank page.

BrightWorks uses some very advanced technology that older browsers unfortunately can't display properly. This current version requires Google Chrome, Firefox 4 or Internet Explorer 9 to see it displayed properly, as it uses drawing technology that is too advanced for older browsers. 

Luckily, only 12.9% of visitors to BrightWorks have been on Internet Explorer, but for those still using IE 6,7 or 8, you'll need to update your browser or download Chrome of Firefox in order to view BrightWorks in all its glory.

Microsoft, who built Internet Explorer, has even made a site that encourages people to upgrade from Internet Explorer 6 and counts down the number of people using it. You can also see how much lovelier IE9 (the latest version of Internet Explorer) is and download it over at The Beauty of the Web.

Or if you don't want to upgrade (or It won't let you), you can also try the Google Chrome Frame, which will create a Chrome-esque environment in your browser and let you view BrightWorks in IE6 - huzzah!

So if BrightWorks is looking a bit funny for you, you'll need to upgrade to view the "beauty of our web".

It can be easy when launching a new site to think that the hard work is done. You've got the concept together, built the back end, got a lovely looking front end, gone through user testing and hit the launch button.

Time to take a well earned break, right?

Wrong.

As our good friend at Dharmafly keep reminding us, "a website is always work in progress".

We've had a great reaction to the launch of BrightWorks, including writeups on The Next Web, Killer Startups, Fundrasing UK and Sparked.com.

However, we've also had lots of feedback from the first users of BrightWorks - good, bad and just plain ugly.

So, we've put together this feedback form to get valuable insights from you - our lovely community of users. It should only take a  few minutes to complete and we'll do our best to respond to every comment, so any feedback is greatly appreciated and you should see improvements to BrightWorks appear as a result.

You can also email us any comments to support@brightworks.me

Thanks in advance :)

Send us your feedback on BrightWorks >>

Welcome to the project blog of BrightWorks, a micro-volunteering app from Bright One.

Bright One has achieved great success in the past two years, all through the passion and determination of its volunteers (as we have no paid staff). But teams of volunteers can only achieve so much, and demand overwhelmingly outstrips supply when it comes to supporting the amount of charities that approach us on a daily basis for support.

This is where Bright Works, a micro-volunteering app that allows projects to be broken down into smaller tasks and completed online, will help us to scale the amount of support we can give.

BrightWorks is a micro-volunteering app that allows nonprofits to get tasks completed for free online by a global volunteer community. It is an effective, simple-to-use and easy-to-get-started micro volunteering platform.

For non-profits, BrightWorks is a cost-free and low resource way for nonprofits to outsource a range of tasks from a range of disciplines, including PR, Marketing, Social Media, Design, Multimedia, Copywriting and more. By outsourcing projects and tasks, nonprofits are freed to concentrate on core activity elsewhere and greatly increase their capacity.

For volunteers, BrightWorks allows them  to work freely on causes that they are passionate about from wherever they are and whatever time is convenient, with tasks geared towards their specific skill set Volunteers can benefit by learning new skills as they complete projects, create stronger networks through working collaboratively on tasks with other volunteers, and give back to the community by supporting nonprofits in their valuable work.

The idea at the heart of BrightWorks that it will be a self organising, ‘peopled’ service, breaking down projects to ensure that many hands make light work, in a visually appealing format so that volunteers feel comfortable in working in the environment. We envision that the app will act as a conductor, allowing volunteers to work moving freely on causes that they’re passionate about from wherever they are and whatever time best suits.

We are currently in the ‘beta’ phase in the site’s development. so the project is still being fine tuned. We think it’s vital to get real feedback from users on what is a new approach for us, so please email us with any comments you have.

And of course there's much more to follow, so make sure to subscribe by RSS or follow us on Twitter.