Volunteer Organizers Wanted

Volunteerism is this decade’s biggest economic theme.

Thanks to the Internet, dedicated volunteers are taking over many areas of the economy that were formerly the sole domain of paid professionals. Software development is moving to open source. Journalism is moving toward blogging. Politics is being done by amateurs.

Business has tried to find profit in both these areas, but there’s a problem. Most don’t know how to deal with volunteer efforts. As the border between paid and unpaid becomes murky.

Normal business education doesn’t have a vocabulary for handling all this.

But humanics does.

Humanics is the study of, and development of, management for non-profit organizations. So far only one group, in Kansas City, Missouri, has tried to organize this, mainly around the "usual suspects" of hospitals, schools, zoos, and charities.

But it occurred to me today, while working on my other (paid)
blog, that much of what humanics teaches is the management of altruism.
People donate money and/or time to keep non-profit groups going.
Non-profits have to be managed, not just like other businesses, but
similarly. And this is a discipline that many new Internet efforts
would benefit from.

• How do you get volunteers to help your open source project?
• How do you organize them? Reward them?
   

There are many very–popular blog sites and open source projects that
are threatened with extinction unless they get this mix right. They may
deal with different goods — Dailykos with political power, HuffingtonPost with fame, MySpace with popularity, Wikipedia with
truth — but they all depend on volunteer efforts. They would be lost
without the volunteers. And none really organizes these efforts in any
coherent way.

Recently the group blog Firedoglake hired a PR lady (left), and the bloggers were heavily criticized for
it. Why? Because the site could afford it? (Maybe it was the title — press secretary.)

Anyone in the public eye
needs a filter if they’re to get the work done. They need someone to
sift through the opportunities, to shortstop the time wasters, and to
grow a public image which can be transformed into cash down the road.

If it’s OK for Wal-Mart and Microsoft to have PR, why not Firedoglake?
Well, the critics said, because it’s unseemly for that to be the first
hire out of the box. Well, nonsense. Publicity is an asset, a vital
asset to any journalism enterprise, profit or non-profit, and if blogging is a journalism
enterprise (some of it is) then it is vital to have someone shepherding
that mission.

Whether your first hire should be a PR person is a choice. Other
sites, and other groups, need other types of expertise. And many of
these disciplines, including PR, can be learned in a humanics program.

More-and-more "businesses" are dealing with
off-the-balance-sheet assets, like credibility and volunteer time. Most
are not yet following the obvious implication that these assets, like
any assets, deserve attention and management.

Those who succeed out of this era and become real institutions will understand that.