This Thursday, the PdF Network conference call will feature an in-depth conversation with Jacob Colker on the topic of "Mobile Volunteers: How to Harness Microvolunteering for Your Cause." Click here to RSVP.

Colker is the co-founder and CTO of the Extraordinaries, an amazing nonprofit start-up that is in the middle of building a dynamic platform that is enabling all kinds of good causes to tap into the unused free time of potential volunteers with mobile phones. This is the cutting edge of a larger trend that many people call "crowd-sourcing," but microvolunteering is more structured and aimed at producing social benefits. As I wrote a few weeks ago,

While they're still mostly under the radar, there's enough going on now, in terms of running code, to start to appreciate the thinking and skillz behind the Extraordinaries project. For starters, their free iPhone app should knock your socks off. So far, with little promotion, about there have been about 4,000 downloads of it and about 1,500 regular users so far, says Jacob Colker, one of the Es' other co-founders. And even on this tiny base, results are being generated, he told me earlier today: Almost 5,000 tags have been added to photos for the Smithsonian's collection (plus about another 8,000 for six other museums using the platform for that purpose); a few dozen new playground spaces have been mapped for Kaboom!; and even a few big cats have been identified as being mishandled or living in abusive conditions, cases that the organization Big Cat Rescue can now start working to fix.

To paraphrase the organization's slogan: If you have some free time this Thursday, join us on the PdF Network call and learn how you too can be extraordinary.