[Foundation-l] Update of Foundation organization

[Sebastian Moleski]

On 3/5/07, Oldak Quill <oldakquill at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I certainly agree that managing 12 volunteers doing a few hours a week
> would be more difficult than 2 employees, but as a not-for-profit
> charity there's no harm in exploring the feasability of relying on
> volunteers.
>
> You mention communication. Volunteers given these positions would be
> aware that they're doing an important job: they should feel obligated
> to working a particular number hours of week and should also feel
> obligated to inform the Foundation when they are unable to fulfil
> this. The Foundation could contact them over the phone or by e-mail: I
> can't see it being hard to contact volunteers.


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.