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Volunteering
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Now more than ever our local community, charities and organisations need the support of volunteers. We recognise that you may not have the time to volunteer in person, or would rather do some volunteering that can be done from the comfort of your own home. If so, Virtual Remote and Online Volunteering could be for you!
Virtual volunteering has many benefits - If you are looking for something worthwhile to do whilst also building transferable skills such as data analysis, helping others, or taking part in research then virtual volunteering is definitely worth considering.
You can give as much or as little time as you want! Read below to find out how to Virtually Volunteer, whilst still making a difference around the world. Please check that you are happy with any terms and conditions if you are asked to sign up in order to take part in any Virtual Volunteering.
We recommend that you register as a Volunteer on the SUBU Volunteering Hub. You can then manually add any Virtual Volunteering that you do to your Volunteering profile, so that you can log your hours and skills and gain digital volunteering reward certificates from SUBU.
A closer look at city forests through panoramic lenses. Street trees are a crucial party of healthy cities. They improve air quality, reduce heat, support biodiversity, and make our neighbourhoods more pleasant to live in. At Arbor Geo-Frame we want to help change that, using the power of Citizen Science and AI through Computer vision. For further information click here.
Count adult penguins, chicks, and eggs to understand when they are at the colony, how many are there and how successful they are at raising their chicks. We also need you to help us identify other individuals (like predator birds) in the images to learn more about their behaviour and interactions with the penguins. For further information click here.
Help describe children's book illustrations to develop better AI that can better understand the visual history of storytelling. Illustrations are an essential aspect of children's books. They help capture children's attention and inspire their imaginations while they learn to read or are read to by an adult. But they also encode important cultural values about childhood and storytelling. What are the objects, people, and emotions that different historical periods have focused on to educate young readers? How have these changed over time? At the same time, what facets of a story are brought to the forefront through illustrations? How have we "pictured" stories for young readers? Through your help we can surface details of children's book illustrations at much larger scale than ever before to study this pivotal creative artform and better understand the relationship between seeing and reading. For further information click here.
The Access Project supports students from under-resourced backgrounds to access top universites through a programme of tuition, coaching and in-school mentoring. Help a young person aged 14 - 16 to raise their GCSE grades in weekly one-to-one tuition sessions in a subject of your choice, enabling them to grow in confience, raise their aspirations and achieve their full potential. What's more, no prvious experience is needed and full training and support is offered. For further information click here.
Crime has been central in shaping the history and society of Australia. This project will make a significant contribution to family, local, social and criminal justice history by revealing untold stories about the lives of people who committed crimes in Australia across time. It aims to discover new perspectives on the types of factors that led to individuals ending up in the prison system. In particular, it is hoped that the research will challenge existing ideas about what the label of 'criminal' has historically meant by revealing the diverse nature of the people who spent time in prison.
Please visit Criminal Characters on the Zooniverse.org website.
Help a child learn to read so that they can succeed in school and beyond. At Bookmark Reading Charity, we're dedicated to igniting the oy of reading in children. Regular commitment is required with two 30 minute sessions a week for six weeks, reading storied and playing games with a child aged betweeen 5 and 10 years old on a secure online platform. For further information click here.
With your help, Big-Bee will overcome data limitations for understanding bee biodiversity and decline. Specimen labels provide information about when and where bees occur and the measurements give bee researchers an indication of bee body size. Combining this information with other bee trait data we can discover how bees are responding to anthropogenic change and other interesting life history stories. Find out more about our research at http://big-bee.net and through our poster introducing the project. Learn more here.
Childhood uveitis is a blinding inflammatory eye disease, and we need to get better at detecting and monitoring it. The key uveitis assessment is a specialist looking inside an eye using a microscope to judge how many inflammatory cells they can see. We need to build up a bank of images that have been analysed and labelled by humans- like you! These images are taken from children and young people - they have given permission for their images to be used in this project, and are all really excited that this study is underway. We are a small team, but with your help, we can start to develop the information we need to apply this exciting new technology to children in need. Learn more here.
NestCams is a project of the Konrad Lorenz Research Center located in Grünau in the Almtal in Upper Austria.
Video monitoring of nests is part of a broader project into the breeding performance of two avian model species, the greylag goose that forms long-term monogamous pairs and the northern bald ibis that is seasonally monogamous.
The aim is to discover which behavioural patterns contribute to reproductive success. For this purpose, they equipped a number of breeding facilities with video-cameras that record the behaviour of the breeding birds. In geese, the breeding huts are located on water; in ibis the camera is installed in nest-niches in an open-air aviary. Help code the video material collected in spring 2018 and 2019!
a tool designed to help us map inclusion in communities and find more places for more people. Make your neighbourhood more accessible by ranking shops and restaurants for their disabled-friendly credentials. Enter your postcode on the AXS Map website to bring up a map and list of businesses. You can then rate these using a star system and also leave reviews.
This project aims to investigate humpback and dolphin songs from different years and regions, to identify sounds in recordings, to classify these calls or units, and eventually to see if we can find individually distinct calls or units. This information will be used to train deep learning models that will be able to identify humpback whale and dolphin sounds in recordings, to classify calls, and to search for underlying structure, hopefully allowing better understanding of the song’s function. If it is possible to identify individually distinct calls, then this information could be used to get valuable information about populations and their health. Learn more here to listed to Whales or Dolphins.
TED Translators are a global community of volunteers who subtitle TED Talks, and enable the inspiring ideas in them to crisscross languages and borders.TED Translators and transcribers help spread ideas to a global audience. Click here to find out how to get started.
This is a completely new type of volunteering. We’re giving you the chance to have an impact on people’s lives and make a difference by resolving crises. Learn communication, problem solving and crisis management skills – recognised by employers, unis and colleges as essential skills. Enjoy being part of a pioneering team. Volunteer the way you want – at home in your p.j’s, in the office or with a group of friends. Access ongoing professional development with a dedicated Coach. Find out more here and to apply.
Did you know that, well before saying real words, children produce very different sounds with their mouths? Already at birth, they cry and cry. We all know these sounds! A little later, they also begin to babble - that is, produce sounds closer to those of adult speech. These are the ones that interest us the most.
The Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, in combination with others, needs your help to classify some very short recordings of babies’ speech sounds to help better understand the very first stages of language learning!
They ask you to label those very short clips as being one “type” of sound. Baby sounds include crying, babbling, and laughing. This is to see how children’ sounds change as they get older. You can listen to each clip as many times as you would like before making a decision.
Please go here for more information, and to take part if you would like.
Be My Eyes is a free app that connects blind and low-vision people with sighted volunteers and company representatives for visual assistance through a live video call.
Chimp and See - The Pan African Programme: The Cultured Chimpanzee (PanAf), based out of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany aims to understand the ecological and evolutionary parameters that have contributed to the behavioral and cultural diversity in chimpanzees. For this project, they have collected nearly 7,000 hours of footage, reflecting various chimpanzee habitats, from camera traps in 15 countries across Africa. By scanning the videos from these traps and identifying the types of species and activity that you see, you’ll help them to understand the lives of these apes—their behaviours, relationships, and environments—and to extrapolate new ideas about human origins. You can help with this project via Zooniverse.
Each year, disasters around the world kill nearly 100,000 and affect or displace 200 million people. Many of the places where these disasters occur are literally 'missing' from any map and first responders lack the information to make valuable decisions regarding relief efforts. Missing Maps is an open, collaborative project in which you can help Put the World’s Vulnerable People on the Map by mapping areas where humanitarian organisations are trying to meet the needs of vulnerable people.
Welcome to Floating Forests, where you can help us uncover the history of Giant Kelp forests around the globe. Most life on the seafloor can only be sampled by SCUBA divers or dredging up samples from the deep. This kind of data requires a ton of (really fun) effort to collect, but it means we’re limited to places we can get to! Given the worldwide distribution of kelp, we need your help to track it across time and space.
Don’t forget to log any volunteering here and you can download a record of your hours and skills at any time.