=Paper=
{{Paper
|id=Vol-2074/article_6
|storemode=property
|title=Exploring Potentials of Process Reflection to Support Communities of Small Volunteer Groups
|pdfUrl=https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2074/article_6.pdf
|volume=Vol-2074
|authors=Alexander Nolte
}}
==Exploring Potentials of Process Reflection to Support Communities of Small Volunteer Groups==
https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2074/article_6.pdf
Exploring Potentials of Process Reflection to Support
Communities of Small Volunteer Groups
Alexander Nolte
University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh PA 15213, USA
Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh PA 15260, USA
anolte@cmu.edu
Abstract. Volunteers groups provide a large variety of valuable services for local
communities, global non-profit organizations and online production communi-
ties. While larger volunteer groups and online communities enjoy the benefit of
an underlying organizational structure that supports the organization of their ac-
tivities, small volunteer groups usually lack this type of support. We conducted
an exploratory study of five student organizations from two large North Ameri-
can universities to assess how they currently organize their activities and to iden-
tify potentials to support them. Our findings indicate a lack of both internal and
external procedures. Based on our findings we discuss a community-based ap-
proach to support process reflection.
Keywords: volunteer collaboration, exploration, loosely coupled groups, pro-
cess reflection.
1 Introduction
Volunteer groups are a cornerstone of society. They provide a large variety of valuable
services that range from large short-term efforts to long term support for local commu-
nities. Examples for such efforts are support for elections [1], disaster relief [21], sports
events [6], local food supply [23], local political activism [20], online production com-
munities [24] and student organizations [10]. Most research investigating such volun-
teer groups focuses on understanding individual motivations [3, 19] to attract more vol-
unteers or on providing means to improve volunteer retention behavior [9, 18].
There are however also studies that focus on how volunteer groups organize. Non-
profit organizations typically employ a coordinator that splits larger efforts into man-
ageable tasks which are then distributed to volunteers and carried out by them [8, 11].
Similarly open source and online production communities are usually led by a core
group that takes over coordination tasks while the remaining volunteers decide for
themselves which tasks they would like to carry out [2, 14]. Both thus have an under-
lying infrastructure that they build their efforts on.
Our work however focuses on small local volunteer that are not typically built on a
stable infrastructure. Such groups are usually formed by individuals that are enthusias-
tic about a certain cause or issue and that share common values [3, 22]. They thus focus
2
most of their energy on the common cause at hand while not spending too much effort
on planning the way their organization operates. They also commonly have to deal with
a high turnover in membership. It thus does not seem feasible for them to focus on
coordination approaches that are based on cycles of observing, analyzing, designing
and structuring activities as can be found in the context of process management [7, 15].
Such groups however still need to coordinate their activities in order to reach their de-
sired goals. In order to identify suitable means of supporting such groups to develop
stable and effective practices we conducted an exploratory interview study with officers
of five student organizations from two large North American universities.
Our study revealed that the organizations we studied mainly focus on organizing
events throughout the year. Our findings also validate our initial assumptions that there
is a lack of coordination especially between groups and frequent membership turnover.
These aspects combined lead to a fragmented and largely episodic way of coordination
that is mainly based on individual experiences. Based on these findings we propose an
approach that combines a set of standard practices for each organization based on ex-
isting documentation and communication traces. These practices can subsequently be
visualized and shared among a community of similar organizations in order to reflect
on them. This approach can thus enable groups to continuously improve, to support the
transition between membership generations and raise awareness about events and the
way they are organized beyond the confines of individual groups.
2 Case study
To uncover how small volunteer groups operate we conducted an exploratory interview
study with officers of student organizations from two large North American Universi-
ties. In the following we will report on the context of the study and our means of data
collection and analysis.
2.1 Study context
Student organizations are volunteer groups that are created and run by students for
students. They are usually connected to a specific school or department in a university.
Every student organization creates its own mission based on the common interest of
their creators and members (c.f. Table 1). In order to be recognized by the university
and to receive funding, every student organization has to attain a certain number of
members (usually ten) and run an annual election for a leadership board. A leadership
board commonly consists of a president, vice-president and a business manager (c.f.
S01 to S04 in Table 1). Some student organizations also have larger leadership boards
(c.f. S05 in Table 1). Neither leadership nor members receive any monetary compensa-
tion for their service in a student organization.
Table 1. Student organizations analyzed.
ID Goal / mission Interview participants
S01 Support women in Information Sciences President and
3
Business manager
S02 Support doctoral students in Information Sciences President
S03 Support students in Library Sciences President and
Business manager
S04 Support international students in Information Sciences President and
Vice-president
S05 Support local community organizations by providing Board members
data-driven services
2.2 Data collection and analysis
We designed our interview study to gain an understanding of how student organiza-
tions operate. The interview protocol consequently focuses on specific activities that
were conducted by members and leaders of an organization (e.g. “Please provide a
short description of an activity [you recently (co-)organized].”). It also includes ques-
tions about individual motivations to join alongside antecedents of retention behavior
[3, 9, 18, 19]. We interviewed a total of ten officers from five different student organi-
zations (c.f. Table 1). The interviews lasted between 40 and 57 minutes each.
We transcribed and coded the interviews using a coding scheme that covers basic
aspects of coordination (actors, activities and resources [5]) alongside motivation and
satisfaction. Our data analysis started with two researchers independently applying the
coding scheme to the same part of the first interview. Afterwards we calculated the
inter-coder agreement based on Cohens-Kappa [4] for each code and discussed those
with low scores in order to reach a common understanding about how to apply each
code. After three rounds both researchers coded the remainder of the data. Following
the guidelines by Landis and Koch [13], we found moderate (0.41 – 0.60) to substantial
(0.61 – 0.80) scores for Cohens-Kappa for all relevant codes. The complete interview
protocol, coding scheme and scores can be obtained by the authors upon request.
3 Findings
As expected we found a large variety of motivations for individuals to participate in
student organizations. These range from identifying with the values of the group, fos-
tering individual careers, interest in the topic of the organization, previous bonds with
members, networking, having fun and gaining new skills. These motivations mainly
matched with the nature of the respective organization (e.g. organizations that are more
career oriented attract members that state fostering their career as their main motivation:
“This organization provided an opportunity for networking”).
The main activity of the groups we studied evolved around the organization of events
(“my responsibilities are primarily to organize and oversee [...] events”). Some organ-
izations also engage in projects to support local communities (“[they] wanted to make
sure that their current clubs and the clubs that they are building are in the places where
they are most needed”, I8).
4
When analyzing how student organizations plan and execute their activities we
found that they all follow a similar structure based on the following four steps: Initia-
tion, planning meeting, task distribution and follow-up. While those steps are common
among all student organizations, there is a considerable difference between how they
are executed in detail. For some particular events task development is described as
“kind of a routine” because these events are “hosted […] annually […] during the
year”. There are however also events that are not part of the regular event calendar. For
such events student organizations typically use a different approach that starts e.g. with
a “brainstorming and some realistic talk about what we [can] get done” before devel-
oping tasks. After the task have been developed they are typically distributed in a
democratic way (“sort of self-picking”). When it comes to coordinating task execu-
tion the different student organizations take different approaches. Some assign a des-
ignated coordinator for an event (“I was in charge of organizing everything”) while
most organizations take an approach where “tasks are divided once and considered
done afterwards” (I6). This approach however proved to be risky since people are not
always reliable and commit to tasks that they do not carry out (“There are some people
that commit to something and still don't make it”) which consequently led to frustration.
In addition to the organization of events which mainly takes place internally, student
organizations occasionally also work with external partners. Such activities mainly in-
volve the respective school a student organization is registered in. All student organi-
zations have to hold elections, register in a school (“we had to reregister our student
organization”) and deal with the process of reimbursement of expenses for events (“I
handle all the reimbursements”). All of the student organizations at the same school
have to go through the same process. There is however no exchange of practices be-
tween student organizations. Every organizations develops their own way of dealing
with these tasks. Moreover, it is usually the responsibility of a single member of the
leadership team to “deal with reimbursements” and that member conducts the process
in a way that appears to be feasible for her / him. However, when that member leaves
the organization, the respective knowledge becomes lost, and the incoming member has
to start from scratch (“when I leave it will be kind of a bummer for the next president
to realize how to do that”) since such practices are commonly not documented.
Frequent membership turnover is a common characteristic of volunteer groups and
student organizations are no exception. It is thus surprising that there seems to be no
strategy in place to organize turnover effectively. Some organizations have acknowl-
edged this problem and try to solve it by “trying [...] to create documents describing
what we did to start the organization” or by organizing a “leadership retreat [...]to
connect the incoming board members [...] with the outgoing ones”. These activities are
however limited to single organizations and not shared between them.
Throughout the interviews it became clear that there is a desire among the members
of the student organizations we studied to improve the way they organize activities (“I
think that we could have been more on top”, “I think as an organization [...] we could
be doing better”). Some organizations are even trying to address this issue by creating
documentation or organizing transfer events like the aforementioned leadership retreat.
These efforts are however still fragmented and not shared between organizations.
5
4 Implications and outlook
Our findings indicate that the student organizations we analyzed operate in similar ways
and face similar issues. They mainly focus on organizing events. For recurring events
some organizations follow established practices while most events are organized in a
hands-on way with no clear process or guidance. In addition, we found that established
practices are based on the experiences of individual members and are hardly docu-
mented. This makes the departure of experienced members hard to overcome. Moreo-
ver, every organization develops, cultivates and continuously reinvents their own prac-
tices and does not share them with similar organizations. It is thus likely that different
organization make similar mistakes.
Student organizations also have to cooperate with externals partners on several oc-
casions. The most common external partner in our case is the respective school the
organization is registered in. Despite these activities being practically identical between
student organizations, each organization develops their own approaches towards them
which leads to the same previously discussed issues.
Our findings indicate a potential for process improvement particularly between stu-
dent organizations. Especially processes that all organization have in common such as
registering an organization or asking for reimbursement could and should become com-
mon practice across organizations. It is however unlikely that student organizations will
engage in formal cycles of process analysis and improvement. We thus propose an ap-
proach that is built on analyzing existing data from group communication tools such as
Slack and planning documents such as Google Documents and Spreadsheets. This anal-
ysis will inform the creation of simple process diagrams which include sequences of
activities, involved actors and resources required [12]. We propose an easy to use and
easy to learn modeling notation such as SeeMe [12] in order to reduce the additional
cognitive overhead of having to interpret complicated business process diagrams. We
are confident that members of student organizations can use such models even if they
are not experts in creating and using models because research has shown that people
are capable of using and modifying simple models of processes they are familiar with
[17]. The diagrams can be viewed, shared, discussed and refined by multiple student
organizations through discussions on models using a web based graphical modeling
tool [16]. The aim of visualizing the processes is to increase awareness about practices
beyond the boundaries of a single student organization. This allows for a broader audi-
ence to discuss and reflect practices which helps to improve and spread them. Refined
processes can then subsequently be implemented e.g. as a combination of Google
Spreadsheets which feed a connected Slack bot. Our approach poses minimal additional
overhead since most organizations use some form of documentation to track activities
already. It does however allow them to discuss and reflect about their activities which
will support student organizations to overcome ineffective and error prone practices.
6
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