It design for Amateur Communities Cristian Bogdan Stockholm 2003 Doctoral Dissertation Royal Institute of Technology Department of Numerical Analysis and Computer Science
Implications to self-sustainability of new activities as drawn from the field studies in Chapter 2 and 3
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- 4.4Guiding principles for intervention aimed at self-sustainability
- 4.5Setting: IT Committee
- 4.5.1Applications designed, developed and maintained by ITC
4.3Implications to self-sustainability of new activities as drawn from the field studies in Chapter 2 and 3What BEST calls “the problem of continuity” is an immediately apparent problem with the sustainability of a long-term activity in the student organisation. As members leave the organisation, a competence is in danger of ‘dying out’ due to lack of ‘skilled workforce’. This danger is more pronounced in ‘non-core’, secondary activities (as different from the core activity of arranging student exchange), which are likely to involve fewer people. For an activity to be sustainable, new members have to be attracted continuously to acquire the respective competence. According to results of Chapters 2 and 3, the challenge addressed in that activity should be apparent to them, and they should feel that they can address it. Challenge and contingency were found as important aspects of motivation in voluntary student work. Challenge was seen to be exhaustible, more so in student organisation work than in the case of amateur radio. Introducing new challenges by proposing new activities such as software-related activities described here is then likely to be welcomed by the members who may ‘change careers’ towards the new activity as seen in Chapter 3. In more specialized competencies like the software-related ones, addressability of challenge is also critical. After the new members join the international group pursuing the activity, learning how to do the work is of great importance for the activity to thrive. This has to take place over a short period, because members stay for a short time in the organisation, and in that time they have other obligations (e.g. studying), they can devote little time to amateur student work and to learning about it. As seen in the field studies, learning takes place mostly hands-on, from more experienced peers, often during cycles of work repetition, where a newer member learns from an older one who has performed the respective task in a previous cycle. We also learned in the field studies that activities are influenced by their professional counterparts, and that influence is not always beneficial. Besides the professional competence representing the ‘state of the art’ in the field, some students see their amateur work in the same field as a personal development for doing later professional work in that field or e.g. presenting it as a plus when interviewing for a job. This is especially valid for software-related skills likely to be learned in the proposed activities. As seen in the EME and SPOC examples, pioneering a new direction for the community is enjoyed by the amateurs, as a contribution that has a wide audience of beneficiaries. In that sense, in the light of the field study results, identifying the audiences of the new activities and making sure that learner amateurs are aware of their audience is important when proposing a new activity in the voluntary setting. 4.4Guiding principles for intervention aimed at self-sustainabilityThe author has gradually developed some principles that have guided his intervention in the setting. These principles have not been consciously articulated from the beginning. For the convenience of exposition this chapter will present the intervention in terms of these principles and will focus less on how the principles were developed. Similar to action research (e.g. Checkland 1981) the researcher activity is structured in iterations of action towards the goal (self- sustainability in this case). After each iteration, the situation of the setting is assessed in relation to the goal, lessons are learned, concepts about the setting, such as our perspective on amateur work developed in Chapters 2 and 3, are enriched, and the intervention is appropriated to be more efficient in reaching the goal. In the particular instance of self-sustainability in the student setting, the case of a large number of members pursuing the new activity is a sign of good results. Another criterion is the diversity of member ‘ages’. If all members are in their last year of study or are about to leave the organisation for various other reasons, the prospects of continuity and self-sustainability are low, hence more new members need to be attracted and informed about the existing work. In times of low membership numbers, the author had to fill in for the members and do parts of the work (software development, design), while at the same time trying to take action to attract more members to the activity introduced in the setting, as well as to try and change the routines and technologies of the group to achieve better sustainability over the long term. In times of higher membership numbers, the author refrained from doing amateur work and sought to learn from the situation and report in accounts such as this one. At the late stages, the author has consciously retired from many sub-activities and stopped participating in meetings (in mid 2001) and stopped reading mailing lists dedicated to various sub-activities involved. In both activities, evaluative reflections over longer periods were made together with the most active members and leaders, and ideas for action to improve the situation further were discussed and acted upon. A formal evaluation of the self-sustainability of software-related activities has been conducted at the final stages, by interviews in the case of software design and via a questionnaire in the activity of software development. 4.5Setting: IT CommitteeUnlike the organisations considered in other non-profit PD studies, BEST has ‘an IT department’, the “IT Committee” (ITC). At present the committee is headed by a “Chief Information Officer” (CIO), who is also one of the Vice-Presidents of the international board, mostly in charge of design, the relationship with users and cooperation with other committees (e.g. SPOC, see Chapter 3) and a “Chief Technology Officer” (CTO) in charge of software development, maintenance, data integrity, etc. This high level of formalisation, with personal responsibilities at the Vice-President level suggests the important role played by the committee in the organisation. The 2002 edition of ITC’s regular summer meeting (held on the sea side in Patras, Greece with the help of the local BEST group there) was the largest summer committee meeting in terms of number of participants (17) in comparison to all other BEST committees in 2002, suggesting that ITC was at the time one of the most active committees. At the meeting, the members decided upon the following ITC definition, that they felt characterizes best what they are doing. The definition was announced to the ITC mailing list as follows: And here is the DEFINITION of ITC, anno 2002: ---------------------------------- ITC IS A GROUP OF FRIENDS PROVIDING RELIABLE IT SERVICES TO ENABLE BEST TO WORK EFFICIENTLY ---------------------------------- Hope you like it and find yourself in it! :-) 4.5.1Applications designed, developed and maintained by ITCTo give an image of the work done by ITC and the size of the projects involved and to get familiar with the names of the projects, we will now review the main applications created by ITC. To provide for the large technological heterogeneity amongst locations, all systems are accessed by local users via the WWW.
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