Chapters meeting 2010/Documentation/Volunteer recruitment

Volunteer recruitment and support

Australia:

• core with very active volunteers
• wants to start introduction/membership kit: information about editing
• Volunteers mainly in the big cities

Numbers of volunteers

• some tens per chapter

What do we define as a volunteer for this session?

• a person active in (real life) chapter activities

Problems

• easy find people for specific practical tasks, but hard to find people to coordinate activities; they are needed to catalyze
• problems to use technical infrastructure
• difference: real life volunteer (is more responsible and more sustainable) vs online volunteer (can quit easily)
• places to meet
• how to find leaders; how can they be convinced

What can be done? How can volunteers be attached to different tasks?

• drop the image of chapter being a "club of wikipedians"
• start more (frequent) activities; they involve people as members; members can be volunteers in the future
• money? not important; small grants (given out by chapters): mostly people don't apply for grants
• announce heads of working groups
• organize camps; have media coverage and output; people are motivated and an initiative step is done for volunteers (link will be sent by Samuel Klein)
• a lot of motivational factors have to be considered; WM Indonesia idea: diplomas