If you wonder what I’ve been working on recently, besides the usual intestines and things, I’ve had several projects for SFWA.
I’m very pleased that one of them, our new volunteer management system, is now live.
You might recall that when I ran for secretary, I felt that the volunteer management was one of the biggest problems SFWA faced. We have a lot of dedicated, enthusiastic and extremely hardworking volunteers and no real support structure for them. When I started working as the Volunteer Coordinator there was no system of tracking volunteers nor any sort of hierarchy of communication. Although people accomplished a lot, there was also a lot of duplicated effort and dropped balls. We also burned volunteers out by asking them to do too much for too long.
Because SFWA is so geographically spread out, we needed a way to track what people were doing and to facilitate communication between them.
The new system will make it easy for volunteers to sign up based on the how much time they have or what they are interested in doing. Only have time to do a quick project? No problem. Have time for a longer commitment? Great! Want to learn a new skill? We can sign you up.
In fact, why don’t you visit the new system and register for the areas you might have an interest in. It’s possible to sign up to get more information about volunteering, without committing to a specific task.
Check out the list of possible volunteer opportunities.
