Although I don't have a great deal of free time to volunteer, whenever I have an opportunity I work on projects where I feel I can make the most difference. While most of my volunteering has been related to cultural institutions, in 2005 I spent the summer at the United Nations. Some of the projects I've participated in recently are described below.
District Six Museum
Cape Town, South Africa: May 2006 - August 2006
The District Six Museum is unlike any other museum. It's an ongoing heritage project striving to preserve the memories of a vibrant 60,000 people community forcibly removed from the District Six of Cape Town in the 1960s by the apartheid government. According to its website (www.districtsix.co.za), the museum "came into being as a vehicle for advocating social justice, as a space for reflection and contemplation and as an institution for challenging the distortions and half-truths which propped up the history of Cape Town and South Africa."
The museum is interested in making its holdings that range from photos to music recordings to oral histories available on an interactive multimedia CD-ROM. I was helping with this project and my experience with multimedia as well as knowledge of information systems and methods of archiving of digital materials came in quite handy.
Ann Arbor Hands-On Museum
Ann Arbor, Michigan: February 2006 - May 2006
Ann Arbor Hands-On Museum (www.aahom.org) provides more than 250 interactive exhibits on math, science and technology targeted towards kids.
The museum staff were interested which exhibits are the most popular, and which ones visitors miss. In addition, they wanted to know how people interact with exhibits and which paths they take while exploring the museum. I spent some time in the museum closely observing the visitors and then analyzed the collected data. The results of these observations helped determine the most successful exhibits as well as the ones that needed to be adjusted or relocated.
International Telecommunication Union
Geneva, Switzerland: May 2005 - August 2005
I spent the summer of 2005 working at the International Telecommunication Union (www.itu.int), a specialized United Nations agency. ITU works with governments and private sector and helps coordinate global telecommunications networks and services. One of its tasks is to address the issue of digital divide.
At ITU I was involved in the development of the website for the World Summit on the Information Society (www.wsis.org). In particular, I worked on improvements to the WSIS Stocktaking Database - one of the world's biggest databases on the development of the information society, which contains examples of activities being undertaken by stakeholders for the implementation of the WSIS Declaration of Principles and Plan of Action.
P.S.1 MoMA Contemporary Arts Center
Long Island City, New York: March 2005
As a part of Alternative Spring Break team from the School of Information, I helped organize Greater New York 2005, the biggest show in the history of P.S.1 (www.ps1.org). We got there less than two weeks before the start of the show, and it was undeniably a unique experience. I was working closely with the registrar who had to ensure than new works by over 160 artists got delivered, catalogued and set up in time for the exhibit opening. You don't get to meet the Director of MoMA every day!