Dan MacNeil and Greg Bedard

The best way to get great tech volunteers is to pay Dan MacNeil & Greg Bedard thousands of dollars in consulting fees. Almost as effective a tactic to sacrifice a goat to the river god YAK-TOR-BOO. (We will demonstrate this in the workshop) As a last resort, bring your questions and experiences to share. You'll have to rely on your fellow audience members while Dan and Greg wrestle the demonstration goat. In the event a goat is unavailable or audience questions don't cover what we want to talk about, we will ask and answer our own questions including but not limited to: 1) Should volunteers be treated with respect? 2) Better results come from not advertising: true/false ?, 3) Are long, ambiguous, projects that sit on the shelf better than short, well defined projects that
are used at once?, 4) Does calling yourself a guru make you a guru?, and 5) Relative to technical skill, just how important is personal hygiene?

Dan provided the following notes from the workshop:

Notes:

One of our goals was to limit workshop attendance and we succeeded. A radically goofy workshop description and a isolated classroom did the trick.

We had 5 people (counting two presenters) show up, It was a very pleasant and useful conversation that started with:

"What do you want from this workshop?"

Take-aways:

1) The http://grassroots.org people do well
finding volunteer web designers for
non-profits

2) Try using something other than email to
communicate with volunteers who don't
respond to email.

3) Voluneers are generally motivated by either:
a. Association with group identity
b. Social opportunities
c. Power
d. Accomplishment

...understanding why people volunteer helps you meet
their needs.

4) If you don't know what skills you need in your volunteers
get a volunteer to access your needs.

5) if one of your missions is training or practical experience
you exist partly to provide volunteer opportunities.

6) Sometimes it is easier to do it yourself.

7) Like for pay hiring, "no volunteer" is better
than "bad volunteering"