Organizations that get > 1M hours/year of community effort

I’m starting some research into organizations that might get > 1 million hours/year of volunteer effort through their websites (and, of course, mobile sites/apps). This comes directly from a conversation some colleagues and I had last week with new Smithsonian National Board member Dave Kidder, co-founder and CEO of clickable.com. 

I think this - - directly or indirectly catalyzing large amount of effort towards Work That Matters - - should be one of the goals (link to project wiki) of the Smithsonian Commons project: 100 million items in the commons, 100 million user interactions a year, and a million hours of community effort a year - - all by the fifth year. Let’s set the bar high, shall we.

I want to understand how they get it (whatever “it” is) to work, how it started, how to support and nurture it, and how to measure it. And a whole bunch of other questions I haven’t thought of yet…

So far, with the help of some smarties on Twitter, I’ve got,

• wikipedia
• ancestry.com
• openstreetmaps.org
• Trove (lots of active users transcribing scans of newspapers)
• www.freebase.com (via @jonvoss)
• librarything (via @jonvoss, @blclark)
• Galaxy Zoo (via @ambrouk, @ageekmom)
• Digitalkoot (via @mia_out)
• Recaptcha (via @charlotteshj)
• i-spot, “Nature surveys and activities near you” (via @ambrouk)
• OldWeather and the Milky Way Project at Zooniverse (via @Timh01)
• [updates below, as they roll in via Twitter and email]
• CamClicker, "Help us sort and tag our 8 million archived NestCam images.“ (Via @darrenMilligan)

Also of interest

• Kickstarter
• Open IDEO

Who else?

[frack! Gotta figure out how to enable commenting!]
[Oh, got it. That was odd and not well documented! You should see a "comment” link below, but not on the mobile view, yet.]

Update [November 22, 2011]

Merete Sanderhoff has posted research on these efforts to the Smithsonian Web and New Media Strategy Wiki.