care&feeding of volunteers (was: Design Process)

At 3:21 PM -0800 11/8/02, Chih-Chao Lam wrote:
>  	* Organizing the Community (as recommended by Michael Bernstein)
>  		* Philosophy
>  		* Process
>  		* Tools

Chih-Chao Lam gave an excellent tree of things to think about, but 
there's one thing that I think is very important that I'm not hearing 
anyone talk about explicitly: nurturing the emotional connection with 
and between volunteers.

Email is hard.  It is much more difficult to gauge your 
correspondent's response than in a contextually richer medium.

If you're on a very public mailing list, it can be even harder.  Scenario:

         Because Pat doesn't want to waste bandwidth, Pat decides not to
         post a message "Wow, great idea!" in response to Chris' great idea.

         Because he/she got no feedback, Chris is convinced that everybody
         hated his/her idea and is just being to polite to say so.  Dejectedly,
         he/she loses interest in the project and drops out.

Ooooops.  You just lost Chris, who has some really great ideas.

Granted, a tight community can form on mailing lists.  (I've seen it 
happen myself.)  However, the lists where it happened were very 
"chatty" lists that routinely had (some) people asking for a decrease 
in the chatter.  It's tough to strike the right balance: enough 
chattiness to build community, but little enough that it doesn't 
interfere with communicating the needed facts.


I think that the hiring someone to do community outreach/volunteer 
coordination is a great, fantastic, superb idea.  I think, however, 
that one person can't do it all -- the community needs to pay 
attention to the fact that there are human beings behind the screens.

It wouldn't hurt to have a section on the Wiki and/or in the goals 
section that explicitly talks about the importance of supporting each 
other emotionally, with techniques for doing so.

There is an article discussing this issue, with a discussion of techniques, at
	http://www.gsb.stanford.edu/research/reports/1999/morris.html
(I think it starts kind of slowly, so please stick with it.)

-- 
Kaitlin Duck Sherwood
Author of the _Overcome Email Overload_ series, http://www.EmailOverload.com
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