Would you work for your association for free?

July 11th, 2006

A post today on the Open Business Blog raises a critical question for all association leaders: what makes people work for free? The post, which takes Wikipedia’s volunteer-driven model as its subject, focuses in on a few factors that motivate contributors to invest their valuable time and attention into an uncompensated role. These factors include:

• A core idealistic belief in the cause at hand.
• The ease and “fun” of participation with others who share a similar passion and worldview.
• Recognition and reward of contributors (with responsibility and power, as well as awards) within the system.
• A tangible sense that collaboration with others consistently produces a better outcome than a single person can create on his or her own.
• The formation of small communities around specific issues, offering interested contributors an intellectual home in which to debate important ideas and concepts.
• The social capital that emerges over time and bonds people together because they have acted in ways that demonstrate reciprocal trust and goodwill.

To this list, I would add two ideas that don’t appear explicitly in the Open Business post, but which I believe are important considerations both for Wikipedia and for associations going forward. The first is the concept of care, an idea well known in the world of knowledge creation and sharing. Put simply, care is the gift of voluntary cooperation, the willingness to give your attention to ensure the well-being of something or someone without an expectation of receiving anything in return. In the case of Wikipedia, many of its volunteers care deeply about preserving its reputation and integrity. Consider what Chris Anderson writes in The Long Tail:

What makes Wikipedia really extraordinary is that it improves over time, organically healing itself as if its huge and growing army of tenders were an immune system, ever vigilant and quick to respond to anything that threatens the organism. And like a biological system, it evolves, selecting for traits that help it stay one step ahead of the predators and pathogens in its ecosystem.

Chris’s biological metaphor would not work nearly as well in the absence of the deep level of care exhibited by so many of Wikipedia’s volunteers. Care is a fundamental ingredient of any successful knowledge-based enterprise, particularly in the realm of sharing tacit knowledge, i.e., knowledge that is hard to articulate because it is so deeply embedded in experience. One irony of Wikipedia is that while it has made a public splash for codifying so much explicit knowledge in its tens of thousands of articles, the real story of its success is the heavy reliance of its volunteer contributors on the tacit knowledge they have created and shared with each other to help sustain Wikipedia.

The second idea is that of microinnovation. While there is no common definition for the term, in this context, I am defining it as the act of making very small contributions to a much larger. much broader innovation. Wikipedia is an innovation along multiple dimensions, and what I am suggesting is that each individual contribution by its volunteers is a form of microinnovation. I think it would be a mistake to underestimate the importance I’m sure many Wikipedia volunteers place on being even a small part of a global, game-changing innovation. It conveys some of the psychological benefits of being an innovator without the accompanying risks of pursuing a larger, independent venture. And I’m certain that many of these volunteers already are innovators in their professional lives, so their involvement with Wikipedia helps burnish the reputations they already enjoy in their specific workplace communities.

So, what are the implications of this post for associations? Taking a look at what is going on with Wikipedia, not to mention open source, it is hard not to be comparatively disappointed by the state of association volunteerism today. Associations are recycling volunteers, trying feverish to fill empty chairs, especially at the chapter level. Association volunteer opportunities often are about nothing but makework that isn’t especially fun, combined with internal political intrigue that saps energy and commitment along with it. Under these circumstances, social capital and care erode and there is no possibility for microinnovation. This description doesn’t capture what is happening in every association, but I believe it is basically accurate for the community as a whole, and that makes it a very sad state of affairs..

Wikipedia volunteers do their work because they are excited and passionate and they want to be involved. They will gladly work for free. So before you ask someone to accept a volunteer role in your association, take a close look at what that experience could be like and then ask yourself the fundamental question that is the title of this post: would I work for my own association for free?

Entry Filed under: Principled Innovation Blog, What's New?, Social Media, Innovation, Associations, Extreme Makeover, The Association Innovator