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Comments on Voluntariness vs. Responsibility, which of them should be considered as a priority for the community team?
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Voluntariness vs. Responsibility, which of them should be considered as a priority for the community team?
Before starting the concern, I want to appreciate and acknowledge the community team for their volunteer efforts to run Codidact and handle its issues as far as they can.
When I sometimes talk to some people about the state of some unhandled issues, I am answered explicitly or implicitly that "the community team are unpaid volunteers", "they have not free time to handle any issue", "Codidact is an open source platform so that anyone can fix a problem", and so on.
I agree that no one should expect a volunteer to do some work, but for an aspiring community there should be a difference between "voluntariness" and "responsibility". In such a community the community team, though they may be unpaid volunteers, try to run the community like that they are paid staff.
The Codidact community team have accepted to be the staff and run the community. So, in my opinion, if Codidact is an aspiring platform, one may expect that they work as paid staff do.
Am I right?
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The initial version of this answer is the accepted and the best answer. You can find the initial version here (Please note the current version of this answer is not original and not valid).
tl,dr: No. I'm sorry, but this just isn't possible. First of all, we all are people with a real life. We all …
3y ago
Working with volunteers is very different to working with paid staff, and if you try to bring the same expectations then …
3y ago
> The Codidact community team have accepted to be the staff and run the community. So, in my opinion, if Codidact is an …
3y ago
> I agree that no one should expect a volunteer to do some work Full-stop. > The Codidact community team have acce …
3y ago
If you wish the staff to start acting like paid employees, maybe you should discuss how you can pay them. Maybe set up s …
3y ago
Since the other answers did not satisfactorily address my concerns, I'll post my answer to the question. If we want t …
3y ago
Post
Working with volunteers is very different to working with paid staff, and if you try to bring the same expectations then you will cause problems.
Paid staff have a contract: the hours and type of work expected from them are explicitly stated, as is their compensation. If they don't see the point of a task that the boss sets them then they will do it, because (a) they still get paid for it, even if it turns out to be pointless; (b) they will cease to be paid if they refuse to do it.
Volunteers often don't have explicitly stated expectations, and derive the compensation for their work from the work itself: perhaps from internal satisfaction of a job well done, satisfaction from the result of doing it, or external satisfaction from pleasant interactions with others brought about by doing it. If they don't see the point of a task and someone above them in the organisation pushes them to do it anyway, they lose motivation and eventually withdraw their effort.
A comparison of the forms of compensation with Maslow's hierarchy of needs will clearly show that anyone who works for a living and also volunteers will necessarily prioritise the work over the volunteering. Some volunteers have plenty of time, but some may be using scraps here and there.
All this means that when working with volunteers, you have to prioritise and distribute tasks differently than when working with employees. You don't have a fixed amount of people-hours per week to do things, because not only might the availability of the people vary from week to week due to external factors, but if you ask them to do things they don't want to then their availability will suddenly go down.
In short, you can expect volunteers to take responsibility for doing the tasks they accept well, but you can't expect them to accept tasks uncritically.
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