Saving the World Without Scratching Your Finger

This article is for people who would like to save the world but can't really be bothered. Let's be honest, that's most of us. If you're one of the minority of folks who do voluntary work, attend political meetings or donate a substantial amount of your income to charity, this is not for you. For everyone else, here are a few ideas I've collected that help you do some good without taking more than a few minutes of your precious time and cost you nothing, or next to nothing.

Donate CPU time

If you can't be bothered to keep switching your computer off and on again (or are worried that this will shorten the life of your hardware), but feel guilty because it is contributing to global warming, then you can donate your unused CPU cycles to climateprediction.net. It's carbon offsets for the PC user: your computer will still be heating the planet, but at least it will be helping to reduce global warming in the long term. We hope. All you need to do is download BOINC and point it at climateprediciton.net and any other projects you want to benefit from your down-time. For example, I'm helping out seti@home (which started the whole thing), the World Community Grid and, of course, climateprediction.net.

Sign a Petition

You might think that only caring enough about something to type your name and e-mail address and click Enter isn't caring very much, and you'd be right. But if millions - or even a few hundred thousand - care even that much, then it does have an impact. It's like reverse advertising. Advertisers know that, contrary to those scary books like The Hidden Persuaders, adverts are not very persuasive. If you think that Bud tastes like diluted urine, no amount of advertising will convince you to drink it. What advertising does well, and why companies spend so much money on it, is simply making sure that people know your brand exists, and know that other people are buying it. The same applies to causes. Even a billion signatures would not convince the president of Iran to establish a secular democracy, but they might alert him to the fact that a person his underlings have thrown into jail is known throughout the world, so stoning them to death might not be such a good idea. A good place to visit is Avaaz.

Microfinance

Microfinance is the big thing these days. It's so successful that economists have started to write books pouring cold water on the idea. Yes, it's that good. You pick an entrepeneur somewhere in the Third World and lend them a piddling amount of money, and they work their arses off to pay you back. This sounds positively unphilanthropic until you remember that if they weren't paying you back, they'd either be paying back some bank or loan shark with interest, or wouldn't have a loan at all. There's the thing: you loan $50, you get back $50. So yes, you are scratching your finger a teensy bit here, since you could have put that money into an investment scheme and collected interest on it, but really it's peanuts. Of course there's a risk that your Himalayan Booties Co-op will go broke and not repay your loan, but it's a pretty minimal risk. The umbrella microfinance organisation I use to loan, kiva.org has a repayment rate of 98.65%. You might not want to put your life-savings into it, but a few dollars' risk is probably worth it for the warm fuzzy feeling.

Get Someone Else To Donate

Some companies will donate every time someone clicks on a link. They get advertising; hungry people get food. The Hunger Site is the classic example of this kind of philanthropy but there are now dozens of sites like this. Some of them, like Free Poverty incorporate games into the process, so the better you do at the game (in this case, a geography quiz) the more gets donated. On the other hand, the games could be more fun. I'd really like to see a collaboration between philanthropists and MMORPGs, so that, for example, you could donate the gold you acquire in the game to a real-life cause, rather than just spending it on dying your boots purple.

Come Up With an Idea

Some people are good at coming up with ideas. Some people are good at following through. I'm definitely the former type. Fortunately the Internet allows the second type to stumble upon the first type. So if you work with a game company, or you're into designing games, feel free to use that donating gold idea (in the unlikely event that someone else hasn't told you about it already). And this brings us to the last and easiest way to make a better world …

Spread the Word

Thanks to the Internet, we hear about people doing good things all the time. (This is a major advantage of the Internet over printed and broadcast media.) Many of them would like your money to help them keep doing these good things, or perhaps they'd like you to get up early in the morning and go on a protest march. How disagreeable, especially when the protest is on the other side of the world. There might even be risk involved. Put briefly, you don't what to do what they want you to do, but you'd be quite happy for other people to donate, march, act as a human shield or whatever. The answer is simple: retweet, digg, share on Facebook or pass the word on in any way you feel like (except for CC-ing it to all your Gmail contacts; that is annoying). It's the philanthropic "long tail". Let's assume that only one person in a thousand will respond to a plea to donate $10 to save the Tasmanian Blue-Arsed Fly from extinction. Let's also assume, though, that one person in ten passes on the plea. Since I'm hopeless at maths, I don't know what this implies, but I'm sure it's good for the Blue-Arsed Flies.

So there you go. The first thing you can do is spread the word by linking to this article. Or if you don't like the tone of the article, just link to some of the links. Even if you don't do any of the things I've recommended, there's a chance that someone else will see it and maybe do one of them.