jhogendorn

I've spent the last decade in community organisations, open source software and similar pursuits where I'm working with or managing volunteers. I'm also audhd and people are very much not my strong suite. Not only am I trying to motivate and get good results from volunteers, I'm trying to work with a wide selection of humanity and lots of people similar to me with their own communication challenges and needs. I've learned a lot over the last decade but theres still a long way to go.

Some topics where we have found friction:

* What internally motivates volunteers, or how do you motivate them externally * Keeping people happy, communication techniques * How to organise large informal groups of people when capitalism isnt a factor * Managing when things go not-quite-right or outright wrong * Getting the boring, unsexy paperwork and compliance things done * Breaking through bystander effect problems "Some other volunteer will do that"

A great example of a difficulty we have is when a group of volunteers has responsibilities and doesnt meet or do them. If you punish the volunteers (loss of funding, privileges etc) they just quit. Now you have no volunteers. What other techniques are there?

Open source, people usually are participating to scratch their own itch, they're internally motivated. Once they scratch the itch, they're gone. So what is the mindset of the core contributors, what makes them different?

What has been your biggest learnings in this space?