On 05/03/07, Sebastian Moleski sebmol@gmail.com wrote:
With communication, I was particularly referring to communication between volunteers when they share a task. Let's say there's some sort of work that could be estimated to take 10 man hours. If you have 5 volunteers doing that, the loss of productivity due to the necessity to communicate between them is immense unless the task is ridiculously mundane. These aren't theoretical guess either, there's tons of literature out there that show projects that failed due to the complexity of communication involved.
Regards,
Sebastian
P.S. Of course, you can always argue that something "shouldn't" be this way or that people "should" behave in a certain manner, that alone won't make it happen though, especially with volunteers. The relationship between a volunteer and his superior is rather different from that of an employee and his superior. In the former, motivation to perform can change much more subtly and requires additional efforts which, in the case of the foundation, isn't feasible since its precisely the lack of staff that caused this discussion.
I think the main issues I wanted to discuss is when does a task need an employee to be completed? At what point does it cost too much time and efficiency to use volunteers for a particular task? There isn't a clear-cut answer to this question, but it is worth talking about.