Social Microvolunteering

A form of online volunteering in which a person installs an application that posts small tasks (microtasks) to their social media feed on behalf of a cause or organization, enabling their friends and followers to contribute by completing these tasks within the social platform they already use. In accessibility contexts, social microvolunteering has been explored as a way to sustainably power crowd-based assistive systems — for example, posting visual questions from blind users to volunteers' Facebook feeds so that the volunteers' friends can answer them. This approach combines the scalability of social networks with the altruistic motivations of volunteering, reducing the cost burden of paid crowdsourcing while avoiding the social stigma that users with disabilities may feel when directly asking their own networks for help.