Transforming Public Volunteer Work

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Transforming Public Volunteer Work

• Lee Sproull
• NYU Stern School
• 1/27/03

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What Do These Have in Common?

• Endeavors
• Improving middle school reading scores
• Diminishing back pain
• Increasing science aspirations for female
  students

3
What Do These Have in Common?

• Endeavors
• Improving middle school reading scores
• Diminishing back pain
• Increasing science aspirations for female
  students
• Attributes
• Socially desirable
• Economic implications
• Must organize many people to accomplish

4
What Do These Have in Common?

• Endeavors
• Improving middle school reading scores
• Diminishing back pain
• Increasing science aspirations for female
  students
• Attributes
• Socially desirable
• Economic implications
• Must organize many people to accomplish
• All have been successfully accomplished via
• Net-based public volunteer activity

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What Do These Have in Common?

• Endeavors
• Developing high quality software
• Providing high quality technical support
• Producing high quality image analysis

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What Do These Have in Common?

• Endeavors
• Developing high quality software
• Providing high quality technical support
• Producing high quality image analysis
• Attributes
• Socially desirable
• Economic implications
• Must organize many people to accomplish

7
What Do These Have in Common?

• Endeavors
• Developing high quality software
• Providing high quality technical support
• Producing high quality image analysis
• Attributes
• Socially desirable
• Economic implications
• Must organize many people to accomplish
• All have been successfully accomplished via
• Net-based public volunteer activity

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Organizing Volunteer Behavior Offline

• Local focus
• Needs
• Members
• Problems
• Constraints
• 2-3 hour face-to-face meeting
• Particular time
• Particular place
• Membership is decreasing

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Organizing Volunteer Behavior Online

• Focus
• Any time / any place
• Micro-contributions
• Aggregation mechanisms
• Constraints
• Net access
• Digital work
• Membership is growing

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Scope and Types of Net-Based Public Volunteer Work

• 10 to 15 million people
• Hundreds of thousands of groups
• Prevalent types (by current size)
• Technical support
• Health support
• Software development
• Mentoring and tutoring
• Scientific and scholarly work
• Other

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Volunteer Technical Support

• 50,000 groups
• More than 10 million people
• Documented benefits
• Industry awards
• Vendors have incorporated them

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Volunteer Health Support

• More than 600 groups
• More than 6.5 million participants
• 14 of Internet users in fair or poor health
  participate
• Some documented benefits
• Shorter hospital stays
• Decrease in pain and disability
• Decrease in social isolation
• Increase in self-efficacy and psychological
  well-being

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Volunteer Software Development

• 55,000 projects with 500,000 registered users
• 5 to 8 hours a week 80 unpaid
• Examples
• Linux
• Apache
• Much of Internet backbone
• Some documented benefits
• Award winning software
• Substantial market share

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Scientific and Scholarly Volunteers

• Mapping planetary images
• 85,000 volunteers
• Work was indistinguishable from PhD geologist
• Analyzing radio astronomy signals
• 4.2 million people
• 1.3 million cpu years
• Proofreading and archiving public domain texts
• 500,000 pages
• 800 books averaging 300 pages each

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Challenges

• Conventions for sharing information
• Quality control
• Sustaining long-term volunteers
• Next steps design and research

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The Future

• Involve new people in volunteering
• Work on new problems
• Transform public volunteer activity?
• And society?

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LSproull_at_stern.nyu.edu