"Do not volunteer your efforts, no matter how noble, no matter how supported by those around you, unless the Queen Bee wants your help."

Sometimes having management support is not enough. A staff member who does not appreciate a volunteer's efforts on their turf can cause a project to fail.

I like the previous suggestion to build your own public site, on which you allow contributions from your students and others. It can showcase your skills, and you will learn more about the value of good design, templates, regular maintenance, and working with volunteers. You will also learn about legal aspects, policies, and moderation of content on a public site.

You might even allow some volunteers to have admin rights to *your* site. That's your choice, you are the queen (subject to ISP policies, copyright, etc).

At some point, you will probably have to remove someone's contribution, or prevent it from being deployed, on your site. You will have very good reasons, that might not be understood by the contributor, even after you explain them. Being queen can be tough.

Idea:
Build your site with a good moderation system and encourage a committed group of volunteers to participate for the long term (eg, perlmonks is an example).

This model might not allow one queen to have total control, and it could lead to a much more vital and living site that achieves bigger goals than just publishing data on the web for a school district (eg, building a lasting community of interested participants that welcomes new users and makes it easy for them to contribute).

In that regard, perhaps this page could be helpful: The early history of Perlmonks

Thank you for sharing your thoughts on this topic, and for spending long hours thinking, building, doing. That time was not wasted.

In reply to Re: OT: A Volunteer's Lament by clp
in thread OT: A Volunteer's Lament by Sandy

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.