Open Source Volunteering
I recently became involved with the New York Volunteering Meetup. After my first meeting, I was most interested in the range of involvement of participants. First of all, group membership is around 275, but each meeting generally brings in less than 15 folks. Secondly, it seemed some attendees came ready to sign up to serve, others were explaining their causes, and others wanted to share what they’ve done in the past or just meet like minded people. Engaging everyone, or harnessing their energy, towards the same causes doesn’t seem easy.
Thinking of our group here at Bug Labs …. the avid cyclists in our office all took interest in volunteering their time to serve as guides for the Transportation Alternatives bike ride – which involved waking up at the crack of dawn on a Saturday. More recently, Heather, Bug Labs’ Queen of QA, signed on to be a buddy to an elderly New Yorker as part of the Caring Community program. I think we are all passionate and giving, but it’s easy to see that if you want to volunteer and get involved – it’s personal.
As we plan our next Volunteer Meetup, I’m thinking about how we can create meaning for the entire group. How can you create involvement, or better yet, continued interest? I mean, there are 275 people that went out of their way to join the Meetup, but don’t seem to be active.
Allison Fine, in her book Momentum, takes a good deal of time to explain the parallels of community involvement and open source programming. I thought this ironic as Bug Labs is all about open source, and I had never related it to volunteering, or giving back to the community. How naive! That’s what open source is. In the open source software community, people contribute their ideas and they can participate how they want to. Power flows from people who self-organize. While this may seem chaotic, when it is managed well (like all good open source projects) a diffuse network of builders all interested in creating a better whole, make amazing progress. The Meetup forum itself, is a great example of open source collaboration. It provides an organized format for people to create and contribute based on the very topics that are of interest to them.
Perhaps applying this philosophy down one more level, into our own Volunteer Meetup group, has some value? Maybe we could facilitate the posting of causes, as well as make it easier for those wanting to give their time and expertise. This could allow people to be active in just the way they want. Have you volunteered and enjoyed it? What made it a good or bad experience? Would you participate more if it was more related to a specific cause or if it was easier? What makes it easier for you?
November 22nd, 2007 at 8:46 am
You guys should join nextNY and encourage other are startups to do some more of the same! It’s very inspiring.
November 23rd, 2007 at 12:47 pm
Thanks Charlie. Looks like lots of great stuff in nextNY. Hope to meet some members soon.
December 1st, 2007 at 10:05 am
There are many sites such as http://www.idealist.org, http://nycares.org and http://www.volunteermatch.org that list all manner of volunteer opportunities. Based on the listings of those three sites alone, there are no shortage of opportunities right here in NYC. Perhaps the New York Volunteering Meetup could organize the meetups so that they are volunteer events rather than a meeting to discuss volunteering at a later date. As an example, one meetup could be a mailing party at Transportation Alternatives. All it would take is some minor coordination between a meetup organizer and any organization’s volunteer coordinator to get one of these events rolling. This might get more of those 200+ group members actively involved.
December 2nd, 2007 at 5:54 pm
Thanks JP. You are right on the money – this is the next step for the volunteer meetup.
We found out several interesting things in our last meeting. One, people do want to hear organizations present their cause, ask questions, and learn more about why it’s worthy to invest their time and resources. Two, some people like to hear and discuss the strategies other non-profits are using so they can take them back to their organizations. Three, (perhaps most importantly and to your point) people want us to organize volunteer events.
The first two findings point to the value of continuing our current format. We will also add a monthly event/activity. There is obviously no shortage of great causes. However, when Bug Labs volunteered with Transportation Alternatives, some of us were more engaged and involved than others. When our meetup group supports a Hearing Loss walk-a-thon, or Chemo Comfort gift package, there is only a percentage of folks that are connected and want to participate. I’ve come to realize that getting everyone on the same page isn’t feasible, or necessary – and we need the diverse passions to accomplish the various needs in our world. Sites like volunteermatch.org will do a fine job for some of our members – and it makes sense to point them in that direction. However, I’ve found this does not give participants the feeling of community, that many of our members want. For now, we can plan an event as determined by a poll on the meetup site. We can make a difference, and share the experience. We’ll see what we can learn from that.
December 3rd, 2007 at 11:35 pm
take it easy