Working with Volunteers
By Karen Pauley from Shibuya.pm
Date: Monday, 23 June 2014 16:00
Duration: 20 minutes
Target audience: Beginner
Language:
I'm interested in the Open Source phenomena. That is the phenomena that makes intelligent people work for free. It's not surprising that both the business and academic worlds also want to know how this works. Businesses have been taught that in order to get and retain the best people they need to pay a good salary and provide a variety of benefits. But that is obviously not the reason why people participate in Open Source projects.
Most Open Source projects are composed of volunteers and by definition a volunteer is someone who works for something other than financial gain. So, why do people volunteer to take part in an Open Source project? And once your project has volunteers how do you keep them? After all, there are so many different projects out there to choose from.
For the duration of this talk I want to spend time discussing the issues surrounding the people who are involved in our projects as Open Source runs on people just as much as it runs on technology.
