Introduction: What is the Unique Contribution of Volunteering to International Development?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This editorial article introduces this IDS Bulletin on the value of volunteering. The issue is based on the global action research project Valuing Volunteering, undertaken in partnership between Voluntary Service Overseas (VSO) and IDS, which explored how volunteering contributes to poverty reduction and sustainable positive change in Kenya, Mozambique, Nepal and the Philippines, and the factors that prevent it from doing so. Two core research approaches were used to collect and analyse insights about volunteering; participatory systemic inquiry (PSI) and systemic action research (SAR). In total, some 3,700 people reflected on volunteering during the research process. While recognising the issues that many current forms of volunteering can create, this collection of articles highlights the potential of volunteering, when understood as a relational and collaborative endeavour, which is sometimes at odds with the pressures on the sector to professionalise and compete.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.012 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.008 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".