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"Advertising agency JWT China and missing children site Baby Back Home have jointly developed an app in China that utilizes facial-recognition technology to help identify missing or kidnapped kids, Creativity Online reported. The organizations say that, with a population reaching approximately 1.4 billion, everyone can be a search volunteer."

"Mozilla, the foundation behind Firefox, an open-source web browser, wants Ousmane's customers to have the option of a device that speaks their language. Smartphones with its operating system (OS) are already on sale in 24 countries, including Bangladesh, India and Mexico, for as little as $33. Other countries will be added as it makes more deals with handset manufacturers. And Bambara is one of dozens of languages into which volunteer "localisers" are translating the OS."

"The volunteer workforce that built the project's flagship, the English-language Wikipedia-and must defend it against vandalism, hoaxes, and manipulation-has shrunk by more than a third since 2007 and is still shrinking. ..."

"But one church in Lichfield, Staffordshire, faced a different fundraising problem: to pay a £6,000 bill demanded for photographs used on its website. The case came to the attention of Gavin Drake, the communications director for the diocese's 600 churches. In creating the church's website, a volunteer had included a couple of images sourced from Getty, a large picture agency, without paying for them. A couple of months later, Getty sent the church a demand for £6,000."

"According to Folding@Home, the organisation that runs the distributed computing effort, the combined power of the network broke 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 operations per second - or one "exaflop" - on 25 March."

"It has been formed as a reaction to attempts by major tech platforms to clamp down on coronavirus disinformation - but the same tech outlets also help enable its reach: the Light's distribution relies on a 5,000-strong private Facebook group where volunteers offer to hand out copies and post them through their neighbours' doors."

"Two high-ranking "admins" - volunteer administrators with privileged access to Wikipedia, including the ability to edit fully protected pages - have been imprisoned since they were arrested on the same day in September 2020, the two bodies added. The arrests appeared to be part of a "crackdown on Wikipedia admins in the country", Dawn and Smex said, naming the two people imprisoned as Osama Khalid and Ziyad al-Sofiani."

"But historians of the future may struggle to understand fully how we lived our lives in the early 21st Century. That's because of a potentially history-deleting combination of how we live our lives digitally - and a paucity of official efforts to archive the world's information as it's produced these days. However, an informal group of organisations are pushing back against the forces of digital entropy - many of them operated by volunteers with little institutional support. None is more synonymous with the fight to save the web than the Internet Archive, an American non-profit based in San Francisco, started in 1996 as a passion project by internet pioneer Brewster Kahl. The organisation has embarked what may be the most ambitious digital archiving project of all time, gathering 866 billion web pages, 44 million books, 10.6 million videos of films and television programmes and more. Housed in a handful of data centres scattered across the world, the collections of the Internet Archive and a few similar groups are the only things standing in the way of digital oblivion."

"The aidbot is a chatbot - a type of AI system designed to communicate with its users online - that links to WhatsApp. It is programmed to ask simple questions about the types of aid people require along with their names and locations. This information is then recorded onto a Google spreadsheet which Hania and her team of unpaid volunteers, made up of friends and family, access to distribute aid such as food, blankets, mattresses, medicine and clothes. Hania used her spare time to build the bot using the website Callbell.eu, which is commonly used by businesses to engage with customers on Meta's platforms such as WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook messenger. She explains that the bot, which is still being used today, makes distributing aid more efficient as it cuts down the amount of time she spends responding to requests for aid over WhatsApp."