Rethinking volunteer management and the forum

2008-07-15 | Filed Under Uncategorized |

Keep the fire burningA remark I hear far too often is “I want to volunteer in BeWelcome, but I don’t know how/where/what!”. Of course, on the one hand it’s never easy to start getting involved in something, but surely we can do better?

What makes it so hard to get involved and to stay involved?

  1. There’s a lot of barriers in place: You have to have a BW profile, enter your name here, there and everywhere.
  2. It’s often unclear who is supposed to help you along, so you’re just sort of waiting for a reply from someone.
  3. You have to pick a team or teams and then it’s still not clear what your actual tasks might/could be.

As always, I think it’s important to start from good principles, so that the actions afterwards taken are logical and effective. The main principles I see here are:

  1. Getting involved should be clear, fast and straight-forward.
  2. It’s important to have a personal connection to your responsibilities. Our best work is done by people that have a very clear view of what is expected of them.
  3. Keep it simple!

I think having “coordinators” like Philipp is actually very helpful, but the idea of all those “teams” seems quite far from the underlying reality. Think about it, we have almost 1 team per two active volunteers (let’s say active means a post per week) and most active volunteers are part of multiple teams… It is also clear that almost everyone works ad-hoc and only on things they are interested in. To me, this is fine, but it also means we have to work with that in mind.

So, I would like to propose a few things.

First, I think task-based thinking should prevail over team-based thinking. Theoretically, any active volunteer can pick up any task that is desired, as long as they are clearly defined. That in turn means that the current coordinators should primarily focus on finding and writing down possible tasks, from consensus or decision in the organization or from a bug report or question. They should also focus on supporting and (re)activating volunteers that pick up tasks within their “area of expertise”. As an example, a translation coordinator could say “language … needs better translation, who can help?” and subsequently support anyone who volunteers with access rights, explanations, etc.

Secondly, I think the BeVolunteer forum (at least) should reflect this ideology. We shouldn’t be dividing posts by topic, but by intention: What is their purpose? Is it a question? A general idea? Does someone need help? Is it a task that can be done? That way, anyone can look into the right area to either get an answer, to volunteer or to make a remark, regardless of topic.

So, what could an intention based forum look like?

  1. Help
    Are you stuck with something on BeWelcome or BeVolunteer? Find help here.
  2. Questions and answers
    Ask questions about BeVolunteer or BeWelcome here.
  3. Volunteer
    Looking for something to do? We have plenty of things to work on.
    (This could be split into “open tasks” and “closed tasks”.)
  4. Big Ideas
    Do you have a great idea? Post it here!
  5. Organization
    Polls, reports, etc. This would be the “official stuff”.

Ideas could be developed in “big ideas”, submitted to a poll in “Organization” if necessary, to be broken down into tasks in “Volunteer”. In “Volunteer”, there would have to be clear links to the relevant coordinator (preferably it’s who submits it there), should the volunteer need support. Depending on a someone’s available time and personality, it would make sense to help out with small things (Q & A) or to get involved in the big theoretical discussions in “Big Ideas”. And again, coordinators would need to be able to extract polls, conclude discussions and formulate tasks.

The “old” forum would need to be put into an archive, possibly with interesting threads moved to relevant new locations.

An interesting idea would also be to have multiple coordinators per topic (why not?) and perhaps even a few “multipurpose coordinators”, being people that can help coordinate with just about any topic. (People like Frank, Philipp, Claudia, Kasper, Jean-Yves and myself come to mind.)

I’m hoping the current coordinators are enthusiastic about these ideas or at least willing to try it out. Let’s hear some feedback and get the fire burning!

Update (2008-07-17): After some discussion, I think a good point can be made to combine “Help” and “Questions & answers”, if only because it is quite difficult for an average user to see the difference between them.

Posted by tgoorden

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Significant improvements!

2008-07-15 | Filed Under Big Picture, Communication tools, Ideas, Information flows, On Communicating, in progress, organisation, technology |

Things always take a bit longer than you wish (except for vacation, which is almost always too short), but I think it’s a good time to announce the successful move to the new server of BeVolunteer.org.

Callum is the first to be congratulated and thanked, as it was he who moved most of the applications and databases. Almost everything was running smoothly in a days work (a few hiccups in test.bewelcome.org, our test environment and some mailing related challenges), which shows just how good our team really is at this stuff! (Let’s not forget the rest of the sysadmins who helped smooth out the process: Tobias, Philipp and Kasper.)

The Blog has received a major overhaul:

There is still a lot to do however. Let’s see what’s left on my “todo list” from last week:.

Besides these very practical tasks, I would like to put some effort into reorganizing the volunteer management structure. I think it would be a good exercise to see how a potential volunteer would explore both BV and BW and how they could get going in the most transparent way possible.

I’d like to continue this cleaning effort until the end of July so please, if you have time, join in and make this work!

Cheers!
- Thomas

Posted by tgoorden

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Summer cleaning: This Saturday! (12th of July)

2008-07-09 | Filed Under Big Picture, featured, organisation, technology |

To really get something done, you have to plan for it. So, this Saturday I’m calling upon everyone that can spare some time to help us restructure and update www.bevolunteer.org. Drop in at any time during the day to help with one or several of the following tasks (I will be present starting 9 am CET, but Callum will come online sooner). If you need certain access to be able to do something, somebody will get that for you. Some things can also be prepared in advance, to go online on Saturday. This list is of all things that I believe have a large general support, so no controversial actions should be included here. It’s an ad-hoc activity, so you’ll have to coordinate yourselves within the group.

The majority of the work will have to be coordinated with moving bevolunteer.org to the new server (Mule), hopefully we’ll have a couple of sysadmins online. However, not all work is technical or even needs server access, so anyone can help.

The end goal of Summer Cleaning is to create a BeVolunteer site that is more easy to navigate, where it’s easier to find the right up-to-date information and where it’s a lot easier to help out.

Please, be pragmatic and look at what actually works at this moment and what doesn’t. This is not an exercise in management theories! Another good guideline is: centralize information, decentralize access.

What can you do for the BeVolunteer Spring cleaning?

Blog

Wiki

Volunteer management

Forum
(Note: Since this is - IMHO - the most controversial one, I won’t suggest too many radical actions. I do - strongly - feel we should improve the forum significantly.)

How to participate? You can leave a comment here indicating you will be able to help out and what you’d like to work on. Then, just show up online on Saturday. You’ll find people in Skype, Ajax chat and (probably) IRC as well.

The ultimate goal is to switch BeVolunteer.org to the new server on Saturday night, with as many improvements as possible. If we don’t get everything done, that’s fine, but let’s give it a try!

Posted by tgoorden

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Amsterdam BeWelcome Collective wrap up

2008-07-07 | Filed Under organisation, technology, unconference |

Sitting in the same room on the same couch is a good motivation to get work done. The Amsterdam BeWelcome Collective was exactly announced for this reason. I was very happy to see old and new friends. The SHE conference that took place at the weekend was a great opportunity to brainstorm about transparency, trust, the gift economy and anything else that can be slightly linked to Sustainable Hospitality Exchange.

Thanks to our star coder lemon-head, who is next to me on the couch right now I finally feel that I got into the BW Rox code and I’ve been able to clean up the code in big ways. At the same time I also have doubts about the current development pace. The framework we use is only used for BeWelcome, and our star coder is the only one who knows his way in it. We started an overview of possibilities to move forward more rapidly. At the start of the Collective I had already been tempted to try out Drupal, which has a thriving community of developers and tons of modules. This doesn’t mean giving up our code base, and it doesn’t mean another long transition. I am going to try to integrate our existing BW Rox code into Drupal and if it works well we can decide to use it. We’ve also looked into the use of CakePHP and other PHP frameworks, but we already have most of the feature of pure OOP/MVC frameworks.

I enjoyed Thomas’ post about improving communication within BW/BV - well, I was sitting in the same room while it was written. Yesterday, I actually experienced a communication issue myself. I posted something in the BeVolunteer forum and then found out that most people who are putting a lot of effort into BeWelcome are not even able to read it…

In order to reinforce the organizational identity of BeWelcome and strengthen ties between BV volunteers we at the ABC just came up with a radical idea for all our real-life meetings: paper hats. ^ Team coordinators get to wear paper hats, so that their status is known to other volunteers. /\ Members of the Board of Directors get A3 format paper hats. In order to increase the flow of ideas, you can write them down and attach them to your hat. Or even write them on your hat directly. So the more ideas you have, the bigger your hat. To avoid any silly icons on BW profiles we propose to make a picture of the volunteer with their hat. Caroline Zeller, our brand new coordinator of the paper hat team, will exploit all innovative technology for our first prototypes.

Opening the wiki took a lot of time. I think it will be easier for the forum. We get rid of the BV/BW volunteer distinction and go through the existing threads to see if they can all be opened up. lemon-head also had some suggestions for improving the functionality (with a better skin, extra links), and I totally think he should get admin rights for the forum.

Final words from Robin about the Collective: it was great to see so much creative bits and bytes flying around our ears. So, where’s the next one? Hamburg, Israel, Bretagne, Berlin, Antwerpen, Aachen or even Africa?

Thank you all for participating in any kind of way - Alicia, Amylin, Andreas, Anu, Caroline, Claudia, Dante, Frank, Harold, Jonas, Julien, Lena, Marc, Marlou, Pascal, Petter, Robin, Rose, Thomas, and many more in Amsterdam and elsewhere.

P.S. The default WordPress skin is very boring. I hope everyone is happy with the new skin - if not, suggestions for improvement are welcome.

P.P.S. I hope to see more wrap ups by more people on this blog - contact me if you need access.

Posted by guaka

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Improving the communication within BeWelcome/BeVolunteer?

2008-07-01 | Filed Under Big Picture, organisation |

I’ve been challenged by many people over the last year to improve upon our communication. The main objection is the amount of fragmentation of information and discussion, but I do believe most (if not all) information can be found somewhere. Here’s what I see as good, general guidelines (practical suggestions will follow) that I hope you will agree upon and that can guide us in making the right decisions:

  1. Transparency
    We should strive for radical transparency. This means on principal everything is public (not behind a password!), with exceptions being made only for privacy reasons (personal data like addresses and full names for instance) and security related information (like passwords). However, this does imply that all decision making should be publicly viewable. Anything that can’t see the light of day simply should not be part of our organization.
  2. Syndication
    Some information does have more than one relevant location. For example, things on this blog are often interesting for “regular” BeWelcome members. Syndication implies then that the information is entered in one central location and then (hopefully automatically) published in other locations as well. The trick is to choose the best primary location for each piece of information and have a good publishing mechanism.
  3. Cut the fat
    If something is hardly used at all, cut it out. I’m all for experimenting with new tools, but we have to admit when something doesn’t really help. Unused tools and locations are confusing and therefor negative to communication.
  4. Simple solutions first
    Yes, I know that we could code all sorts of things ourselves, but that takes time and a lot of effort. So, solutions that require fairly little effort are greatly favored over complex new implementations.
  5. Decentralization
    There are too many “single points of entry”, situations where people have to wait for usually one person to give them access to a trivial function or information. On the other hand, there is a large group of volunteers that I feel we can “trust” perfectly to make the right decisions in those situations. I believe, to be able to allow the organization to really grow, we have to trust each other radically. (If we give each other keys to our houses anyway, this shouldn’t be such a big step. Think of how many people in BeVolunteer you really trust to handle user accounts, my count is over 20.)

OK, on with the show. Based on the above principles I want to make the following suggestions: