Roan Kattouw wrote:
[The volunteers'] role, IMO, is to keep the collaborative environment positive. This means being welcoming to new staff, embracing them, pat them on the shoulder when they to things right and correct them when they do things wrong, while keeping their patience.
I feel that especially the shoulder-patting and patience parts have been lacking lately, at least in the perception of the staff members I spoke to. This leads to them perceiving the environment as predominantly negative towards them, which does not encourage them.
Please pardon an outside comment which may be misinformed, or too blunt; I haven't been part of this discussion or followed all of it, and I'm not well-informed on the tensions which motivated it. But:
It seems to me that if we're talking about backpats, it's the volunteers who are more likely to need them, not the paid staff. Since you hire the paid staff, you can presumably pick people who are professional enough to understand their job requirements and remuneration structure, and the special issues involved in working with volunteers. One of those issues is that the volunteers are sometimes going to be cantankerous, or even downright vituperative, and if in spite of this you think it's primarily the volunteers whose job it is to "keep the environment positive", you're likely to be disappointed.
You don't hire the volunteers, of course, and you're somewhat stuck with the ones you get. If one of them gets his nose bent out of joint over some perceived slight, then you might have to give him a pat on the back (even if you think he doesn't deserve it), because you can't get rid of him if you think he's being oversensitive, and you certainly can't tell him to quit his blubbering and be happy with the paycheck he's getting.
The volunteer's primary job is to donate real work for free, and if he imagines that one of the perks of the role is the right to get kvetchy from time to time (perhaps due to a twinge of jealousy that the staff are getting paid and he's not), then that's okay, and it's the staff's job to humor him, with a pat on the back if necessary. Unfair and asymmetrical it may be, but the staff does *not* get to get kvetchy in turn about a negative or unwelcoming atmosphere.
[Disclaimer: I am not at all trying to suggest that Wikimedia's volunteers *are* a bunch of praise-craving blubberers. But if anyone's going to act that way, it should be the volunteers, not the staff.]