Engines, Specialists, and Ambassadors

Managing projects with volunteers is a very different challenge than managing projects that people are being paid to work on.  I've ended up doing a lot more of this professionally than I might have expected in my life, through my involvement with things like the SBOL standards, the iGEM Measurement Committee, GP-write, organizing reviewing for workshops and conferences, etc. 

When people are being paid to work on a project, then you can rightfully expect contributions at a certain level, based on what they have committed to. If they aren't contributing at that level, then that's a problem, and you can have a discussion about how to fix that problem, up to and including redirecting those resources to somebody who can contribute as expected.

With volunteers, on the other hand, every hour of effort is a gift to you and to the project. You have no right to expect any particular level of contribution from any person, and if you demand more than somebody feels like giving, it's entirely appropriate for them to simply walk away.

This can leave a volunteer-based project with a real dilemma. How do you actually get stuff done when nobody is required to do something? It also can feel quite unfair, since often a few people are giving lots of time and effort, while many others are doing barely anything.  Shouldn't those lazy people do more work?

I've come to realize that, for many volunteer projects, that's not the case. It's OK to have a lot of very different levels of contribution, and even the people who look like they are doing nothing can often make a very valuable contribution to the project.

How I've come to think of it, inspired by something I heard from somebody else at a meeting a few years back, is that you can think of the people involved in a volunteer project as falling into three rough clusters, Engines, Specialists, and Ambassadors.

Three clusters of volunteer project contributors: Engines, Specialists, and Ambassadors.

• Engines: These people are the working core of the project, who can be counted on to step up if something needs to be done, just because it needs to be done. There are usually very few people who are Engines, but they get a lot done and deal with a lot of scut work and thankless tasks. As such, Engines are also in danger of developing feelings of elitism and entitlement towards the less committed members, which can quickly poison an organization. If you're running (or de facto running) a volunteer project, you are probably an Engine.
• Specialists: These people tend to have particular aspects of the project that they are interested in, and contribute only to those. Specialists often also have particular narrow skills that may be in high demand both for this project and for other things that will take them away from the project. On the parts they want to do, they may put in lots of time and be fantastically productive. Other things, they either just won't volunteer, or else may offer but fail to deliver on anything but the parts that are their specialty.
• Ambassadors: The rest of the people on the project, the majority group of "slackers" who never get anything much done, are your Ambassadors, and they're more important than you may think. Consider this: why do they stick around if they aren't actually getting anything done? After all, there's something missing that means they can't actually contribute effectively---most often either time or relevant skills. Yet they keep hanging around, which means that they must think that the project is important to pay attention to in some way! That's what makes them your Ambassadors, because they carry their knowledge of the project into all the other non-project things that they are involved with, and will spread that knowledge to other people in the community, making connections and effectively promoting your project.

Hopefully, you can see that all three groups, Engines, Specialists, and Ambassadors, have an important role to play in making a volunteer project successful. Moreover, I've personally found virtually no way of telling who is going to turn out to fall into which category. As such, when I'm running a project, what I tend to do is simply welcome all comers and let them sort themselves over time by interest and inclination. 

Similarly, over the lifetime of a project, people will tend to drift up and down the classes based on their interests and the other things that are going on in their lives. A healthy project will then adapt to people drifting in and out, and will adjust the scope of its ambition to match the contributions that its volunteers are capable of making, rather than trying to extract more labor out of people who do not need to even be contributing at all.

Engines, Specialists, and Ambassadors: understand and embrace the differences in skills and interest levels, rather than trying to make things fair, and I believe your volunteer-based projects are more likely to succeed.