[ocdtrekkie]

More often than not, the opportunities for people to help vastly outscales the amount of hours volunteers are able to put up to help. Anyone can clean up trash on the side of the road and it's a no-skill job, so why is it still there? Open source projects everywhere need help, but a lot of them languish unsupported anyways.

Most people likely know countless ways they could help, but the time to do so doesn't match up with the need that's out there.

[writimov]

This is the question I was really getting at: where is the site where I can go help beyond the ways that most people already know about? Where I can I volunteer my services to fix a posted problem with MikroTik routers being insecure? Where is the site with a giant list of problems and descriptions of the people needed to solve them? And matching algorithms to put the two together?

More to the point: where can someone who has a totally unique skillset help solve a specific problem?

The assumption I'm making (which may be faulty) is that everyone has a unique and valuable skillset that may only apply to specific problems. (Like for example, I know nothing about B list celebrities from 1950s Hollywood. But if someone had a problem to solve that involved knowledge of that period, they could post the problem and match it to a profile of a Movie professor, or just a regular person who happens to know alot about that subject. The technical complexities of proving someone knows what they are talking about and their authority can be trusted, basically filtering spam contributions, is the biggest technical challenge. But it seems like new tools like machine learning and neural nets could help us here.)

We all know we can help do basic low-skilled stuff: donate money, volunteer at homeless shelter, build houses habitat for humanity, volunteer at local garden, trash cleanup etc.

What website do I go to that collects all of these ways to help and more?

For ex, what website do I go to for helping in these scenarios:

1) I understand politics and want to work on bills in various countries to stop climate change?

2) I understand biology and want to cure the algae bloom I saw in my local lake yesterday?

3) I understand the physics of mechanical design and want to help fix a design flaw in a pair of garden shears that keeps cutting my skin between my thumb and first finger?

Or approach it the other way around: what site can I go to, register my interests and skills and get assigned to existing projects that will change the world? Where I can help anytime I have free time. Or get an assignment in my email?

Scenarios:

1) I sign up on the site saying I have a biology degree and live in Napa Valley, CA and can do environmental stuff. I get assigned to take Cesium 137 readings to followup on the Fukushima disaster in wine country at various GPS coordinates and get sent a geiger counter, instructions, and training.

2) I have Crohns disease but am willing to wear a data collection monitor on my body and send the data to multiple companies developing new medicines or treatments.

3) I care about elephants and can volunteer to take a shift watching through the eyes of an automated drone that scans for poachers on the other side of the planet?

There are plenty of ways to do basic help in a semi-organized manner to treat the symptoms of chronic human problems. There is no site that I've seen where solving the largest problems of humanity can be crowdsourced.

Where I can I volunteer my services to help design water desalinization plants to make them 100X cheaper?