OTW - love and frustration

[skaredykat]

I continue to love the Organization for Transformative Works.

The AO3 keeps providing me with entertaining things to read. I keep wanting to draw sparkly hearts around various parts of Fanlore and Fanlore editors.

Despite my feeling that if an author purposely and consciously tries to remove a fanwork from the interwebs -- though I wish they

Comments

[esteefee]

very thought-provoking post.

bringing in volunteers for minimal time commitments, well--I don't want to discourage, because I think you would be invaluable, skaredykat, both for your communications ability and also for your librarian-mind. at the same time, I can't speak for volcom, but there is definitely overhead attached to bringing in new volunteers and exiting old ones, in terms of training, of course, but also for volcom and Systems and everything that has to be put into place for a new volunteer so they have access to what they need to be productive. you get into a situation of diminishing returns, or maybe it's more a chicken-and-egg thing: if you could bring in enough minimal-engagement volunteers, they could definitely make up the cost, but I know right now Systems is kinda swamped.

>Also, if you ever need a break, there's a button on your volunteering dashboard that says 'click here to let your team/committee know you won't be able to volunteer for a while<

once someone is actively in the system, it's just not cool to just leave their accounts idle without removing access, from a systems security standpoint. if someone gained access illicitly they wouldn't be around to notice. but also from a licensing standpoint for some of the services we use, our numbers would become inflated. and sadly, it isn't possible to have one-click dashboard removal from all the variegated services we have added them to, nice though that would be. :) we outsource to a 3rd party for chat, e.g., and to another for bug-tracking. we grant access to an internal wiki, and internal mailing lists and secure encrypted file servers and development servers.

as I said: overhead.

[skaredykat]

Thanks for commenting!

The balance between cost and benefit is always really hard, and it often seems impossible to step back and say "to get the greater long-term benefit, we need to stop spending all our time on The Most Urgent problems and need to all commit to always spending 10-25% of our time on The Less Urgent But Long-Term Important Problems That Will Bite Us In The Ass Later If They Keep Being Not Attended To."

As
scribblesinink commented at the DW version of this post, that can be done by separating out which people work on implementation vs. which work on Tactics&Strategy -- or sometimes it works to have everyone literally count their hours and make sure they spend 1 or 2 out of every 10 hours on Tactics&Strategy (and one of my personal perennial favorites, Documentation) instead of on actual doing and acute problem-solving the other 8-9 hours are for.

As for systems access, you're right.

Ideally such a dashboard button -- which I'm espousing (PR hat on) because I've seen people in various places say "as a volunteer I would really like that" -- would be a front-end streamlined way (again, requiring tech/coder investment behind the scenes that would, one hopes/believes pay off relatively soon) to disable access, and clicking the button next to it to say "I'm back" would put the on-hiatus volunteer on a (24-hour?) fast track to getting their former access levels back, by automatically sending out messages to the relevant access-level-granters that previously approved volunteer so-and-so is back and should be given access to a, b, c, and d as soon as possible, but not to e and f.

Basically it'd function as a combination of feelgood for the volunteer ("Even if I say goodbye-for-now by dashboard button instead of long caring e-mail to my chairperson they care and will still love me and it's easier and more appreciated to do it this way than by just never responding to e-mails again") and something of a back-end access-level management tool for Systems in that when someone clicks their button it automatically sends out the information of what that (former or returning) volunteer has access to and what they should be taken off of or reinstated to.