Article by George Norman

On 23 Jun 2009

Google is committed not only to protecting the environment by reducing power consumption and cutting down on CO2 emissions, it is also committed to making the world a better place to live. The way Google plans to achieve this goal is by making it easier for you to access volunteer events in your community via a new service called All for Good.

“All for Good provides a single search interface for volunteer activities across many major volunteering sites and organizations like United Way, VolunteerMatch, HandsOn Network and Reach Out and Read. By building on top of the amazing efforts of existing volunteer organizations like these, we hope to amplify their efforts," explained Engineering Tech Leads, Paul Rademacher and Adam Sah.


Here is what you can do with Google’s All for Good:
- Find volunteer activities near your geographical location.
- Let your friends know about volunteer activities in your region.
- See what volunteer activities your friends are interested in.
- Keep track of the volunteer actions that meant the most to you.

On the All for Good web page you will discover three app offerings:
1. All for Good gadget that you can add to your web page, blog, Gmail or iGoogle home page.
2. Catalista Android app to locate volunteer activities in real-time via your mobile phone.
3. The All for Good API for developers that want to come up with their own apps.

“In the spirit of open data, All for Good has a data API that anyone can use to search the same data displayed on the All for Good site,: commented Paul Rademacher and Adam Sah. “All for Good was developed entirely using App Engine and Google Base, with the full code repository hosted on Google Code Hosting. We'll be inviting developers to contribute to the open source application soon. Just as releasing the Maps API led to an surge of independent and creative uses of geographic information, we've built All for Good as a platform to encourage innovation in volunteerism, as much as an end product in itself. We hope software developers will use the API or code to build their own volunteering applications, some even better than the All for Good site!”

Keeping with the volunteer theme in this article, do not forget about Mozilla’s Service Week (details here).



Tags: Google, All for Good, Volunteer

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