User:Sethwoodworth/MembershipDraft

Prologue

Potential community members have been searching for a way to get some sense of ownership of the OLPC project. I originally started hanging around in OLPC irc rooms just to get a better idea of what was going on and maybe get involved. Many people, prominent and talented, have sent emails to the volunteer@l.o list trying to contribute as well. For programmers the contribution structure system is established and familiar. They contribute code, and are listed in some obscure way as a development contributor. Some 60 of these volunteers have found their validation in the Support-Gang, others have formed local OLPC groups (SeaXO) and still others have forged their own paths in content and non-programming activities (Cjl, Mchua(?), myself). Others have languished and disappeared due to a lack of structure for their contributions (cafl).

Volunteer Community Processes

Bureaucracy is to be avoided in volunteer communities. Instead adhocracy is to be desired. The trick is to create structures (suggestions) for people to work within. This allows volunteers the benefit of collaborative experience to know best practices and not to replicate effort, but no Single Way that volunteers *have* to contribute.

Ownership is also important in any Volunteer Community. They need to be able to show up and See Work that they can work on, and then they need to See their work implemented. Users need to know each other and be able to talk, discuss, and find out about each other's work asynchronously. With new online volunteers and such a media popular project as OLPC there is a need to be able to document completed work and dedication in a public facing way. This serves user's pride-of-authorship, documents work done to third parties (resume experience), and documents what has been accomplished.

Volunteer Ownership and rewards/benefits should also be important to OLPC because it provides another public face to OLPC. OLPC has limited internal resources and manpower to evangelize the program, recruit volunteers, and explain the program to interested parties. These are all tasks that could be handled in a more adhoc way. If a user has a @volunteer.laptop.org address, or is given swag from OLPC as a reward/perk of service, it gives users to bring up and discuss OLPC. Providing brochures, handouts, and moo cards as handouts to these users (even if they print them themselves) would be an example.

Examples

There are several examples of groups that have created and supported membership groups that give an established community a solid backbone of contributors and facilitators. OLPC itself has somewhat pioneered in this field by the creation of the Support-Gang.

Wikipedia

WP, partially, allows for the recognition of contributors via edit counts (universal or by article) and awards barnstars for contribution of note. This, along with their lofty goal, has allowed for a strong sense of ownership of the encyclopedia.

Wikipedia also has adminships that it awards contributors. This is almost an accident, however. Adminships are only supposed to be awarded for those who *need* the privileges and in stead are often awarded for substantial contributions.

Because of Wikipedia's sheer size many types of sub-groups have spontaneously generated. These small taskforces and sub-groups cover and handle a multitude of tasks, both directly -pedia and meta-wiki related. Some groups are focused on editing one subset of articles, others on fixing vandalism, and others still on welcoming newcomers. User can gain status, recognition and a sense of community by participating in any of these groups and doing a multitude of tasks.

Gnome Membership

http://foundation.gnome.org/membership/application.php

The Gnome foundation has a process for becoming a voting member, and are chosen for those who provide non-trivial contributions to Gnome. Non-trivial contributions are normally considered code, debugging, and maintaining packages, but may also be awarded for advocacy or for producing other materials for Gnome. Also memberships have been awarded for documentation and tutorials.

Memberships are decided on by the "discretion of the Membership Committee and the Board of Directors" last two years, and can be renewed. And Gnome membership gives one a vote in the foundation.

Ubuntu Membership

http://www.ubuntu.com/community/processes/newmember Ubuntu has a system of membership (created by Mako?) that closely resembles the process for Gnome. But Ubuntu is a much more community driven program and has connections to a far less technical group of users who require much more documentation, artwork, how-to's, forum support. Ubuntu is also much more focused on creating and supporting local Ubuntu user groups, and advocacy. So their definition of a non-trivial contribution is much broader than that at Gnome.

You also get much greater bonuses for becoming a member of Ubuntu. Officially you get:

• a vote in community processes,
• @ubuntu.com address,
• an irc cloak,
• business cards (self print)

Unofficially you get:

• great resume entry
• big bragging rights

Mozilla Campus Representatives

Mozilla has a program where they recruit Campus representatives at universities all over the world. They supply these students with swag, Firefox cd's, informational materials, posters and most importantly: publicity for any firefox/FOSS event that they host. This provides students with a great inroad into Mozilla for internships, and allows students to really work and be recognized for a task. All such CR's are unpaid except by the occasional t-shirt or sticker package.

PETA/PETA2

PETA and PETA2 both have youth evangelist programs where they reward/recognize students and youth who distribute informational materials about their causes. Students document their distribution of fliers, posters and leaving around pamphlets around colleges, libraries and coffee shops. The more that evangelists document their work (pictures, back up from other users) the more swag they receive. This is also a great testbed of potential interns and longer term volunteers

OLPC Support Gang

The Support gang, when it was formed by Adam in December, the OLPC community was in an interesting state of flux. Post G1G1 there were a lot of new non-affiliated users hanging around IRC trying to find a way to get involved, or just hanging out and learning about OLPC. CJB, SJ and a few others were able to keep users informed and interested and around irc. Some few got involved in content projects, but many disappeared. A large number of them jumped on the chance to get involved in OLPC in any way when the Support-Gang came around. They were happy to help and get involved. But many of them weren't particularly interested in user support as much as getting involved. So many of the users languished and disappeared.

OLPC Needs in a Community Structure

OLPC has very lofty goals. The goals in organizing and packaging content are well supported by a wealth of materials available in open license. Unfortunately not much of this material has yet been packaged or even pulled together for OLPC. Two issues have stopped or slowed work in this area. The work is very broad, and requires a range of skillsets. And

The work needed is pretty broad in scope. We need illustrators, translators, people who can format, hack php/html, and lots of people to find and review content. We have lost people due to their not feeling appreciated or understanding where their work was going. We have also had far more people arrive, fail to find the tasks we needed them to do, and then disappear. New users too could be recruited by good examples of content to work with.

Proposal

OLPC needs a strong volunteering structure.

A strong wiki structure would also allow for the compartmentalizing of tasks for directly rewarded volunteers funded by an external organization. For instance if Americorp wanted to give a scholarship for an OLPC volunteer they would have established workflows and goals. This would aid with the recruitment of Americorp or other organizations as well.