Signing Up Volunteers

One of the biggest challenges that we have faced thus far is determining how to use the help of the many folks who have offered their time. This concept is completely foreign to what I have been doing for most of the last 20 years. But with nonprofits, it is. And with something as exciting and motivating as FreshBrain, the number of people who have offered their help has been awesome.

So the challenge has been what to do with them. We know that once FreshBrain is truly up and running and students are doing projects, we will need lots of volunteers to act as advisors. But outside of that - I hadn't spent any time thinking about what we could have volunteers do.

That all changed following the planning meetings that we had last week where we created the detailed schedule to get us to go live in January. It became very clear that we needed help to be successful. The most important roles that we need filled are community owners for the various technology areas.

The definition that I am using for a Technology Community is:

The set of people, content, projects, activities and training material that are tied together by a common interest or technology. There are a number of other communities that are a part of FreshBrain including unregistered users, registered users, parents, advisors, students, etc.. A technology community will include members from this larger set of communities.

The technology areas include:

• Gaming - all things related to video or computer games (single or multi player, first person, etc.), platforms that they run on (handset, pc, console, etc.) and technologies used to create them (flash, Java, etc.).
  
• Video / Movies - everything that you can do with video including creation, editing, merging / mashing, injection of ads or content and publishing
  
• Web (Community?, Ecommerce?) - the large set of things that you might do online including creating a website, social network, store, etc.
  
• Graphics (Design) - all things related to creating, editing, modifying and publishing of graphics (need to determine if this also includes pictures)
  
• Music - all things related to audio including creation, editing, merging / mashing, injection of ads or content and publishing
  
• Eco / Green - all things related to eco or green technology

This may all be a bit confusing, so let me try to explain it another way. As students peruse freshbrain.org exploring various technology areas, much of what they will see initially is information about that area, its different aspects, the kinds of technologies used and so on. As they get more and more interested, they will begin to participate in the community asking questions, reading blogs, looking at the kinds of projects that others are doing, and so on. And at some point they will decide to jump in and do something themselves.

This progression, the information that is available, the people that participate in the community, the projects and activities that they can complete and the technology that they will use will be defined and managed by the Technology Community owner.

I was successful in finding a number of technology community owners. I have Video / Movies, Web and Eco / Green covered. And I have good leads on Gaming and Graphics. That will be more than enough to get us to January.

I also found someone who is interested in helping us to run early testing with student groups. She has good technology experience, is a process person and is very passionate about the whole FreshBrain concept!!

We made good progress in a number of other areas. I will save them for another blog update:)