transforming public volunteer work lee sproull nyu stern school 1/27/03
TRANSCRIPT
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
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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
Attributes– Socially desirable– Economic implications– Must organize many people to accomplish
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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
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
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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
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?
