in reply to Process for Site Improvement

One problem those of us who've worked with volunteer-based organizations quite a bit tend to find is that more low-level volunteers take up more time to organize and supervise. Someone has to do that supervision and organization, and it usually ends up being one of the people who was doing a large portion of the work. So by taking in too many volunteers too quickly, you actually lose productive time from your existing volunteers. It's often better to take in a few volunteers at a time and get them up to speed so they can work with little supervision, even though that is often frustrating. I can't say that's currently a concern for PM, but I wouldn't be at all surprised if it was. It's quite a common issue.

One thing you might want to do is check the screen names of monks who make comments in PMD threads against the lists of gods, pmdev, and the other cabals. They comment under their regular individual monknames, but their opinions often reflect their positions as members of those groups. I know Corion, jdporter, and tye comment on feature requests quite often from the top of my head. I'm sure others do, too. It could be that you're frustrated in part because you're just not recognizing the official weight of some of the comments because they don't come from a formal office worded as official announcements.

If you're really excited to help, you might want to volunteer yourself. Perhaps you could start with something supporting PM from the outside rather than trying to jump into site development right away. Lots of monks have code that track stats, is suitable to place in the Free Nodelet, or that does something equally interesting with the XML feeds. I think it's understandable that some time invested in PM as a user and such are a basis for admission to some of the groups responsible for running the site, but that doesn't keep anyone from giving back through other means.

I'm glad to see you're so enthusiastic about PM. It really is a great site. I recently went over the eight year mark here, and I'm still sometimes learning new things not just about Perl and how the other monks think about Perl (which is often just as fascinating). I'm also still learning things about PerlMonks itself. tye taught me something useful yesterday about the site in the CB in fact. He informed me that the [SoPW] (SoPW) link goes to a node that links to Seekers of Perl Wisdom and Posting on PerlMonks and explains SoPW, and even tells people that the new question form is at the bottom. I was previously unaware of that two year old node that's very handy for mentioning in the CB when new monks ask where to ask a question.

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Re^2: Process for Site Improvement
by ELISHEVA (Prior) on Mar 13, 2009 at 14:42 UTC

    Thank you so much for taking the time to share your thoughts. I found this particularly thought provoking:

    One problem those of us who've worked with volunteer-based organizations quite a bit tend to find is that more low-level volunteers take up more time to organize and supervise.

    This is also my experience, but I see it as a challenge that we need to address rather than a show stopper. When a group is small, organization is largely implicit - people chat on a post or in the CB or in real life over lunch and poof! things just happen. But when groups grow, process and structure has to become more explicit. Finding the right structure, especially in volunteer communities, takes a lot of dialog and even maybe some research into how other communities, especially on-line communities, handle this issue.

    If this doesn't happen, then the percentage of people carrying on the volunteer work shrinks as a percentage of the people carrying the project. At the same time the amount of work increases; the complexity of coming to consensus increases; and the risk for people to feel marginalized (or burnt out) increases.

    Contributing to something helps people feel ownership. The more ownership, the more commitment. The more commitment, the greater the likelihood that someone will volunteer in a manner that can really win the trust of you or tye or the gods. And the core group widens. So with the right structure, we can create a virtuous cycle rather than an exhausting one.

    Best, beth

    Update: as per mr_mischief's comment about possible misinterpretation.

[reply]
      Just as a note, your last paragraph could be misinterpreted to include me with tye and the gods. Winning my trust would be nice, but it's neither sufficient nor necessary for joining one of the orders.

      I entirely appreciate your enthusiasm about improving the process. I'm sure you can understand tye's reluctance to rush people into positions that could be abused, too. Perhaps something that includes more volunteers faster than what we have now, but still slowly enough that they can be trusted and properly mentored would be a good compromise. If you have notes on how other groups work more smoothly in organizing volunteer resources, the gods would probably like to know. I can't speak for them, though.

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