Volunteers and time commitments

Mozillians
#1

Several topics around volunteers came up fast and furious at the last meeting. This is one I wanted to talk about a bit more.

We were discussing the time commitment different type of work requires, and how some work - community management was the example we used - requires the type of time commitment that is much easier to give when you are getting paid to do it. What I wanted to dive into a bit more was the ethical implications of volunteer work that takes up more than x time. My bar was enough time that it would interfere with the person’s ability to earn a livelihood, so let’s use 40h as a starting point.

First thought - Being realistic about who has time

Without implying that we do this, I’d suggest that it would be wrong to design pathways that rely on finding volunteers that can contribute more than x hours. Everyone needs to make a living with few exceptions - retirees and the wealthy are the two examples I can come up with. Students have obligations to school, and stay-at-home parents have obligations to their children equivalent to earning a livelihood. So as we’re thinking about volunteer roles and responsibilities I think we need to consciously factor in the time commitment required to do a good job, and be realistic that we shouldn’t hope for a volunteer with x hours of free time to come along.

Second thought - How to design for participation in time consuming roles

So how do we design for participation in roles that take more than x hours? Is there a way to split the work up among a committee or multiple volunteers? Are there roles where sharing the load just wouldn’t work? Do we have examples of this working either within Mozilla or in other 3rd party groups?

Third thought - Is the ethical answer to just pay people? How?

This one got a bit more time in the meeting than the other two. This one’s also a bit trickier, I don’t want it to derail discussion of the other two points, but of course you can’t really talk about the other two points without considering this as well.

Mozilla pays its interns, so if we do find there are volunteer roles that are best served by someone who can put in full time hours, is it more consistent that we also figure out how to pay these people as well? I would use an example of a community working on something that requires a lot of time in the short term. Perhaps a FirefoxOS launch team, or community members advocating against legislation in their region, but a short term, intense project that could really benefit from having a single community/project manager to make sure things are driven at the necessary pace.

This sounds pretty similar to an internship to me, but internships are only open to post-secondary students. Are there other ways to explore financially supporting people besides employment and internships? Grants, sponsorships, short-term internships or apprenticeships for non-students? Besides cost, of course, do regulations make these things prohibitive for the occasions where we might consider them?

2 Likes
About regional local community management in Mozilla
#2

On the third thought, I know Outreachy is something that Mozilla participates in, but I don’t know that much about how it works, so I didn’t mention it in the top post. Maybe someone else could talk about it?

#3

It might be good to know that the community manager role we discussed on
the participation call, was one that a contributor asked to do vrs one we
created because it needed to exist. Having said that, I am excited about
that type of opportunity because volunteers can take projects far beyond
our imagined goals while providing real life experiences that can lend to
career goals and resumes. I want to enable that, but the design needs to
include accountability. I’m not sure it was clear when I spoke that the
role was created in collaboration by the volunteer, so wanted to clarify.

I also know there are a lot of people community(guilty myself), who spread
themselves thin taking on many roles - and this is lending to a workshop
I’m creating with FSA about helping people find their ‘Mozilla Super
Power’, and invest there vrs spreading themselves thin by taking on too
much.

#4

I believe we spoke generally about community managers, I did use myself as an example but we also talked to Janet (so there’s a volunteer created role vs a Mozilla paid for role). I think it’s a good general example because it’s fairly obvious the benefit a community manager provides and it’s easy to imagine the role taking a lot of time, and there are community managers/project managers all over the place both paid staff and in volunteer communities. Certainly there might be other examples where a single role can be very demanding on time, it would be good to mention those as well.

#5

But that’s also an interesting point to consider - what about volunteers who do have the time, or want to take on such a time consuming role? We don’t let interns work for free even if they would, paying them is a matter of policy. Should it be a matter of policy to prevent volunteers from working full time in a single role? That works back to my “Second Thought” and also what George mentioned on the call about the “bus factor.”

Someone might have the time to do the role that way, but are the chances that we wouldn’t be able to replace them with another single person? If we’re splitting up the work across multiple people as a practice (vs paying people somehow) should we push for that still even if the person has the time?