Mugshot of the Weekend Warrior!

Summary:

Or know your people to use their skills, knowledge and motivation for the best!

Mugshot of the Weekend Warrior!

Roger_jg 1184945476|%e %b %Y, %H:%M %Z|agohover

This is an important discussion base on two previous posts on this forum, one mine one by Teresa.

It is indeed essential to know WHO are the people willing or trying to do some online volunteer. Unfortunately it is difficult to conduct a survey in this regards, but a US Survey do exist about more traditional form of OV.

The way round this is to try to define ourselves the audience we think we have, based on ourself, our friends and our experience. At least it is possible to drawn an outline of our Weekend Warrior. Of course there will always be exception… That's taken for granted!

Time: The Weekend Warrior is an active person who has limited time to invest.
Attention Span: The Weekend Warrior has a short attention span. It can be extended but overall he won't engage in long term project.
Knowledge: The weekend warrior has the knowledge of his trade and hobbies.
Skills: The skills of the weekend warrior are limited or highly technical (in another word: limited! Not useless though!!!)
Learning curve: can learn quickly or slowly but considering the limited amount of time available, tends to dislike complex systems and processes.
Motivation: parallels that of the attention span

Do you see something to add or correct. Of course we are not here talking about hard core volunteers…

Roger_jg

last edited on 1184946310|%e %b %Y, %H:%M %Z|agohover by Roger_jg + show more

Re: Mugshot of the Weekend Warrior!

timedesk 1184963054|%e %b %Y, %H:%M %Z|agohover

Despite the multitude of problems OVO concepts have they can work if:

• There is no learning curve
• Professionals have easy access to problems that need to be solved and they know can be solved by investing a minimum of their valuable time by solving bottlenecks less qualified vollunteers won't be able to tackle.
• What I mean is you need a project management structure whereby "workerbees" keep track of the basic picture and call in support from the pro's for detailed advise. I am convinced in many cases a simple email will be enough to move a project forward.
• There is a simple service desk per basic topic, ie if banking & financing is the issue we need to have the support of banker and accountant as they speak the lingo. If you're talking about a building initiative, you need to have a resident vollunteer architect to prevent nice ideas and dreams from spiraling out of control etc. If your are setting up an ICT center try to get the support of biggest geek around to translate the plan, and prepare a proposal to the resident Telecom company. Do it once per country, and you can solve problems in multiple projects and at the same time motivate sponsors to come on board.

I am convinced we have all these specialisms within our network, but none of these folks have ever been asked to participate this way, although I have seen it happen in isolated projects, that's exactly the situation we want to prevent .

One thing is essential, don't try to sell the OVO organization, sell the challenges to problem solvers and financial partners. The OVO head office is only the engine driving progress on the ground, not a pretty billboard! and should have one goal only… to become irrelevant as soon as possible …
Just my simple vision
More later
Ben

last edited on 1184965368|%e %b %Y, %H:%M %Z|agohover by timedesk + show more

Re: Mugshot of the Weekend Warrior!

timedesk 1184964545|%e %b %Y, %H:%M %Z|agohover

The " workerbees" have the biggest challenge, as they have to do the legwork, translating dreams into real live projects, without solving the problems themselves. This requires special skills, many of our vollunteers have shown to master. What they've lacked is the proper framework from within to operate. Mckinsey Company has provided a simple set of guidelines that will solve this problem. I am translating them now into a software application

last edited on 1184965005|%e %b %Y, %H:%M %Z|agohover by timedesk + show more

Re: Mugshot of the Weekend Warrior!

Teresa Flanagan 1184972351|%e %b %Y, %H:%M %Z|agohover

Hi Ben: I am impressed with the "service desk per basic topic" model. It does sound like it would work with simple e-mail communication. My only reservation would be that I would hope that the people doing the ground work or "workerbees" would be sufficiently motivated to do most of the legwork themselves, and ask advice only when really necessary. The service desk should not feel compelled to be more than a consultation service, and I hope it would not be deluged constantly with trivial requests. Teresa

Re: Mugshot of the Weekend Warrior!

timedesk 1184997179|%e %b %Y, %H:%M %Z|agohover

Theresa,

I have been experimenting this model for a few months now acting both as workerbee and to some extend specialist My experience shows that this format will actually shift the amount of work directly related to the challenge, from be being a local problem with 50 %, which means the local issues automatically get devided into manageable tasks. Once you have seen how it works it becomes real fun as you start delegating more complex tasks (these will not be real problems for the professional you contact, as it's their line of work). These however can in most cases never be solved without 3 party support at a country level where the service desk has the proper contacts and is always in the know of what's going behind the scenes. That way answering trivial questions is not really a problem because the desk will not have to spend much time on research.

An added benefit is that it will identify simple actions that will increase motivation of the local community to come out and play too, who than fill in the blanks that otherwise would have been done by the workerbees themselves. To see that happen is very rewarding. It also shows that the original plan may in the end not be the solution to the problems people are trying to solve, so this concept also prevents people from wasting valuable time on mission impossible dreams, yet at the same time it offers the applicant a workable alternative.

To make this all work you don't need a fancy website, just a few simple tools like a chat box and a web log managed by the people working on the project. The output in the end can be simple email or even sms, so nobody has a learning curve finding his/her way around the activities. Behind the scenes all you have backoffice web toolkit aggregating issues and achievements into a presentable format so the PR folks can beat their drum.

last edited on 1184999080|%e %b %Y, %H:%M %Z|agohover by timedesk + show more

Re: Mugshot of the Weekend Warrior!

Roger_jg 1184985630|%e %b %Y, %H:%M %Z|agohover

Ben

I think we are on the same hymn sheet here !

Do not sell the organisation to volunteesr, sell an opportunity for the potential volunteer to put their skills at use in a rewarding action!

Move from need to resources, in other word it is the kitchen door salesman vs. the local market. In this vision some core volunteers would be in charge of pro actively contacting those with the appropriate skills, rather than problem being exhibits on the local market waiting for potential buyers!

Roger_jg