Managing Volunteers

[love_pirate]

I recently had a sobering thought.  For a long time, I thought that “working in the nonprofit sector” was a viable career choice.  However, this is just as useless as saying, “I want to work at a corporation” without specifying what type or what job.  If I did want to work at a nonprofit, I would have to narrow it down, and the most likely

Comments

[sofarfromcaring]

This sounds similar to some of the community liason stuff that a friend of mine has been dealing with. She does a lot of work with Open Source Software, and currently works for Red Hat/Fedora - I know a lot of OSS groups have community organizers/ambassadors, which sounds similar to volunteer organizing. Perhaps pinging around the OSS communities could give you some leads to places that appreciate that sort of thing?

[love_pirate]

Well, it certainly never occurred to me to work with software, since I literally know nothing about it. Would you need a lot of technical knowledge to do community organizing for those groups?

[sofarfromcaring]

Not necessarily, although you'd need to get yourself edumacated on the principles and beliefs of the OSS movement. My general experience is that they're very welcoming to newbie volunteers, so if you find a good community you'll get people who will mentor you and show you your way around the movement.

There are certainly aspects of technicals skills that you would pick up (using MediaWiki well is a big one for a lot of them), but a successful community liaison doesn't so much need to have technical skills as understand that they exist and what challenges are associated with them.