Volunteers, and Participation Inequality - 3 comments

I'm on the lookout for volunteer organisers from among Labour bloggers. The target is for, perhaps, a dozen of you to give up some of your free time on a regular basis to develop our network, and boost political blogging (contra this).

What's in it for you...

• Being an active part of an organisation.
• The chance to arrange meet-ups with other bloggers.
• Incentives to succeed: the more effective you are, the more interesting life will be: more social events, better links with the political community where you are, and so on.
• A small symbol of your status is available - from central funds (i.e. my pocket).

If you don't read Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox newsletter on Web usability, you should look in from time to time. This edition, from October 2006, concerns inequalities among online groups:

All large-scale, multi-user communities and online social networks that rely on users to contribute content or build services share one property: most users don't participate very much. Often, they simply lurk in the background.

In contrast, a tiny minority of users usually accounts for a disproportionately large amount of the content and other system activity. [...]

User participation often more or less follows a 90-9-1 rule: 90% of users are lurkers [...]; 9% of users contribute from time to time [...]; 1% of users participate a lot and account for most contributions:

Jakob speculates that this situation could be improved to 80-16-4. Perhaps - it would be great: one advantage of decentralising is that it increases the chances of someone finding that key and passing the knowledge back.

My expectations of volunteers...

• You must have a vision in mind of how blogging can help the Labour Party, help society, and make for a healthier political culture.
• You should invest some of your own time, or hand over to someone who will - it's the only way. However, you'll be completely free to say how much time, and when. You'll be your own boss, in other words.
  
• You should build links with Labour bloggers in your area and make the case for (ethical and thoughtful, ideally) political blogging. You should also encourage party members you know - plus potential members and other supporters, and especially councillors and other elected members - to give blogging a try.
• As social events will help here, you should arrange and promote these (perhaps quarterly), or else add a segment to existing party meetings, perhaps getting together before or after the main feature.
• Our network can do more when we have regular, and decentralised funding: so you should encourage donations.
• You should report on progress using the forum, as and when necessary.
  

These are all things I try to do, and perhaps should do more, but I cannot hope to adequately cover the entire UK. It won't work, and (arguably) it hasn't worked. Anyone who knows me well must realise that it's only a matter of time before I go under a bus, whether on Borough High Street, or Church Road, Hove. I don't want to sound egotistical, but who would take the lead then? The least I can do is decentralise to others, and help get them up and running. The alternative is that many of these fine ambitions will not be realised, and we'll be sitting around in two years wondering why not, spending our Friday afternoons checking Bloglines, or setting up Facebook groups and websites to try to bind together something long since dissolved.

In some ways this is a problem of economics that I'm hoping to solve in a non-financial way, by encouraging "public spiritedness", rather than individualism.

"Territories"...

I would like each organiser to cover a particular region; a county; or perhaps even a city, when Labour bloggers has a strong presence there (e.g. Manchester, Oxford, London, Brighton & Hove, perhaps), and make it their own. I don't think sharing an area would work. Alternatively, a volunteer could take on the role of building links with a Labour (or allied) party from another country (e.g. Australia, Ireland).

In summary, if you're interested in becoming a volunteer organiser, or helping out in other ways, simply get in touch, or post on the forum.

Update (05/04): Nobody at all interested??