Exploring Volunteering

Last week, the Nuffield Council on Bioethics announced that it’s running a consultation into whether more people should “be expected to donate organs, eggs and sperm and, if so, how far can we ethically go in encouraging them to donate?” A lot of the questions focus on the role of incentives and giving in delivering healthcare. For example:

“Do you think that it is in any way better, morally speaking, to provide human bodily material or volunteer for a first-in-human trial for free, rather than for some form of compensation? Does the type or purpose of bodily material or medicine being tested make a difference?”

Whatever the results of this consultation, it’s clear that the nature of giving continues to prove controversial. At what point do incentives turn ‘giving’ into straightforward ‘exchange’? Perhaps, the reason for this controversy is that the issues go to the heart of our conception of the ‘common good’.

Incentives and volunteering

The incentives question is one that we’ve been wrestling with in volunteering for many years. Do incentives and obligations fundamentally alter the nature of volunteering?

For this post, I’m going to look at the research on how mixing markets and giving has influenced the development of blood and organ donation and what the implications are for our conception of volunteering.

In 2009, Michael Sandel as part of his Reith lecture series on ‘A New Citizenship’ discussed markets and morals. One of his key points was this:

Markets are not mere mechanisms. They embody certain norms. They presuppose, and also promote, certain ways of valuing the goods being exchanged. Economists often assume that markets are inert, that they do not touch or taint the goods they regulate. But this is a mistake. Markets leave their mark. Often market incentives erode or crowd out non-market incentives.

For Sandel, many aspects of our life together can be “corrupted or degraded if turned into commodities”. We need to think carefully about when to use exchange (markets) to deliver goods and services, and when to create other means to deliver necessary goods and services. Our decision can’t simply be to choose the delivery mechanism that’s most efficient, it also has to be about how we value the goods in question.

Sandel’s wider concern, as sketched out in his book Democracy’s Discontent, is how prevailing political ideology (particularly in the US) is wedded to individualism which ultimately leads to us all feeling ever more disempowered. He’s interested in how we can better recognise the interdependence of citizens and the need for civic association. This brings us back to the role of volunteering, but sets it against this ideological backdrop of how we understand the motivations behind social behaviour.

Market logic vs logic of giving

In the 1960′s, economists, particularly those in the Chicago School, such as Gary Becker, began to develop Rational Action Theory (RAT), also known as Rational Choice Theory. As the theory took hold, it began to be applied beyond simply explaining the market and monetary exchanges, to all sorts of other kinds of social behaviour. It developed out of utilitarian philosophy of the 19th century. This thinking focussed on individuals as self-interested actors who think rationally about attaining rational goals.

Elie Halevy famously described it as ‘dogmatic self-interestedness’. Many criticisms of the theory, essentially make the point that as social theory, it turns on a really hollow conception of what it means to be human. The other problem with Rational Choice Theory is that it mixes ‘what is’ (positive), that we are rational and self-interested actors, with ‘what ought to be’ (normative), that we should be rational and self-interested actors.

Alain Caille suggests gift economy theory provides an alternative to the dominance of Rational Choice Theory. He draws on the work of anthropologist Marcel Mauss (nephew of Emile Durkheim) who, almost 100 years ago, looked at the ceremonial giving practices. His work suggested that in early societies there were ceremonies that formalised the triple obligation to give, take and return. That is, obligations (a) to give a gift, (b) receive the gift (if you’re offered one), and then (c) respond in turn by giving a gift on to another (not necessarily to the original giver). This kind of early pre-modern giving had nothing to do with charity, instead it was distinctly combative. Caille explains:

Pervaded with aggression and ambivalence, it is an agonistic gift. It is not through economising but in spending and even dilapidating or in accepting to lose his most precious goods that one can make his name grow and acquire prestige.

Caille continues:

The goods which are so given, taken and returned (counter-given) generally have no utilitarian value at all. They are valued only as symbols of the social relation they allow to create and feed through activating the unending circulation of a debt, which can be inverted but never liquidated. Gifts are symbols, and they are reciprocal. Through the circulation of those gifts what is secured is the public recognition of the identity and of the value of the parteners, individual or collective engaged in the gifts circulation.

The most famous illustrations of this type of giving are the potlatch of the Kwakiutl Indians (Northwestern Canadian coast) and the kula of the Trobianders. Caille believes we can link modern giving, such as blood donation, to this earlier form of giving that Mauss researched and wrote about in his 1924 book The Gift amongst other places.

Obligations and giving

Jonathan Miller in his radio series charting the rise of the National Health Service in Britain, picked up on the anthropoligical significance of the British semi-ritual of having a cup of tea and a biscuit after giving blood since the very beginnings of large scale blood donation during the Second World War. The ‘tea and biscuit’ tradition has clear parallels with the idea that there is a need to respond in turn to the gift of blood. It’s significance is social, rather than medicinal, since the medicinal benefits of drinking tea after giving blood are minimal.

It’s clear as well that an important driver at the beginning of blood donation, was a way of giving back because a friend or close relative had benefit from donated blood. This continues to be a key driver. Anecdotally, I’ve heard people describe again and again their motivation for volunteering as wanting ‘to give back to the community’.

A clear conclusion of many researching blood donation is that one specific problem of introducing market logic alongside giving blood, breaks this balance of obligations to give and give back. As the incentive to give is increased, it undermines the obligation to give. As a result, there is no net benefit. Michael Sandel again:

“Perhaps the best-known example of market norms eroding or crowding out non-market norms involves the case of blood donation. The sociologist Richard Titmuss compared the United States system, which permitted the buying and selling of blood for transfusion, with the system in the UK which banned financial incentives and relied wholly on donated blood. Titmuss found that rather than improve the quality and supply of blood, the commercialisation of blood led to shortages, inefficiencies and a greater incidence of contaminated blood. His explanation: putting a price on blood turned what had been a gift into a commodity. It changed the norms associated with blood donation. Once blood is bought and sold in the market, people are less likely to feel a moral obligation to give it out of altruism.”

Richard Titmuss’s book ‘The Gift Relationship: From Human Blood to Social Policy’, first published in 1970, is the seminal work in this area. When he wrote the book, he was writing about the NHS as much as he was blood donation: We cannot understand the National Blood Transfusion Service without also understanding the National Health Service, its origins, development and values. (p 60)

Modernisation of giving

In one sense, Titmuss’s work was to ensure giving survived and flourished in modern society. Indeed, one of his objectives was to study “the role of altruism in modern society. [This book] attempts to fuse the politics of welfare and the morality of individual wills. (p 59)

Unlike gift-exchange in traditional societies, there is in the free gift of blood to unnamed strangers no contract of custom, no legal bond, no functional determinism, no situations of discriminatory power, domination, constraint or compulsion, no sense of shame or guilt, no gratitude imperative¦

¦(S)ocial gifts and actions carrying no explicit or implicit individual right to a return gift or action are forms of ˜creative altruism’¦They are creative in the sense that the self is realised with the help of anonymous others. (p 279)

¦In not asking for or expecting any payment of money, these donors signified their belief in the willingness of other men to act altruistically in the future, and join together to make a gift freely available should they have need of it. (p 307)

As individuals (donors were) taking part in the creation of a greater good transcending the good of self-love. To ˜love’ themselves, they recognised the need to ˜love’ strangers. By contrast, one of the functions of atomistic private market systems is to ˜free’ men from any sense of obligation to or for other men, regardless of the consequences to others who cannot reciprocate. (p 307)

From these quotes it’s clear that Titmuss’s project was to modernise giving. What’s interesting is how these ideas can be interpreted today, given the way the web is transforming giving. Are we much more accustomed to giving to strangers via the web?

For Titmuss, a key aspect of modern giving is the idea of giving altruistically to strangers (note volunteering is typically defined as helping non-relatives, i.e. strangers). This modern kind of giving, as Philippe Steiner describes it, is “implicated in a world of radically distant relations, relations among strangers.”

Giving to strangers

There are important echoes here of the ideas of founding sociologist Georg Simmel who identified the stranger in modern society as someone who is far away and close at the same time.

The Stranger is close to us, insofar as we feel between him and ourselves common features of a national, social, occupational, or generally human, nature. He is far from us, insofar as these common features extend beyond him or us, and connect us only because they connect a great many people. [The Stranger, 1908]

If giving is connected to the values that make us human, the challenge for Titmuss is how to drive and channel giving between strangers. In the case of blood, this means collection, rather than production. We all have access to means of production of blood, no-one has access to the means of mass production. Hence the need to collect. Philippe Steiner links this notion to Karl Polanyi‘s notion of ‘fictitious commodity‘:

“In underlining the fact that blood is collected, Titmuss indicated that it is not a produced good, that it is closely tied to what makes us human, and that when commercialized, it falls into the category of fictitious commodity -like work, money, and land, according to Polanyi.”

Giving is becoming more exchange-like

For Titmuss, part of what makes modern giving efficient is that it overcomes the challenge of collection and recognises that we are giving to strangers. In this way of looking at it, it’s no coincidence the storage facilities for blood came to be known as blood banks (previously simply blood depots) because they act as the mode of exchange between strangers (givers and receivers). Ironically, this more modern type of giving is rather exchange-like. Steiner again:

In modern giving, anonymity is maintained in order to protect the recipient from the affective and symbolic burden of receiving the gift of life. The paradox is that this makes it hard for us to see such giving as a social tie, whereas that value – the affective and symbolic value of a social tie- has generally been the one associated with this form of commerce between human beings.

This built-in anonymity strips out the potential for giving to be combative or aggressive, as it was in pre-modern society. This use of anonymity (or at least the weakening of the social tie) seems to me to be incredibly reminiscent of much of the discussion of the web at this point. The web is excitingly social in as far as it is more efficiently connecting strangers, providing a mode of exchange for givers to give. Current debate about social media is to what extent the web can be used to strengthen social ties.

This notion of efficiently connecting strangers is one I’ll return to in a later post. Particularly interesting is the work of Jacques Godbout ‘L’esprit du don‘ (1992) who looks at how giving between strangers has been behind the growth of the voluntary sector and ‘la vie associative’ in the last few decades across the globe.

Giving is efficient

One of the reasons Titmuss’s work has stood the test of time is because he both defends an ideal social order and provides an illustration of how it works in a very concrete situation. It is both idealistic, and realistic. It’s a dual argument combining inspiring values and practical efficiency. This is something we should pay close attention to when arguing for volunteering.

Titmuss’s critics, particularly early on, included economists (Kenneth Arrow and Robert Solow) who couldn’t see why remuneration of blood donation would not result in more supply. However, in the years that have followed 1970 when Titmuss’s book ‘The Gift Relationship’ was originally published, research has generally born out Titmuss’s claim that giving is the most efficient way.

Giving and motivation theory

Rational Choice Theory sees individuals as influenced by preferences (self-interest) and constraints (e.g. money and time). Economists find preferences to be rather elusive and hard to measure independent of the behaviour in question, as a result they measure constraints to determine behaviour. Bruno Frey’s work on motivation draws out this issue of efficiency of giving. For Frey we should distinguish between two different types of motivation. There’s extrinsic motivation (e.g. a monetary incentive for giving blood), and intrinsic motivation (e.g. giver feels happier after giving blood). [Dan Pink's TED talk is a great summary of these concepts and why they matter]

Frey shows how extrinsic motivation tends to crowd out people’s intrinsic motivation. In other words, in the case of giving blood, when financial incentives are offered, some are encouraged to give blood, however others who would have given freely are put off. If the level of financial incentive is increased, there is a net increase in donors. However, there’s also an increase in undesirable donors who are no longer open about their likely risk level, for fear of not being paid.

Michael Sandel’s point, that I touched on at the start of the post, is that paying for blood where it was previously given, changes the way a society perceives the value of giving. In other words, once a payment system for blood is introduced, it can be difficult to shift a non-remunerated system. Lithuania is a fascinating case in point which is trying to move from a remunerated system of blood donation established under the previous communist government, to a non-remunerated system to meet European Union requirements. Sandel also highlights the case in the US where kids have financial incentives to read books, and the experiment in Israel where the introduction of fines for late collection of kids at a nursery led to an increase in late pick ups.

Giving is socially constructed

It is crucial to understand that blood donation is a gift economy that takes place in an industrialised context (driven by technical efficiency). As a result, giving is in many ways socially constructed. It is instructive to look at Lorentzen and Paterson’s 1992 comparative study of France, a country where kidney donation between living persons is extremely rare, and Norway, where such donation often occurs. Philippe Steiner:

Whereas in France only 41% of waiting-list patients received a transplant in 1990, there was no scarcity of organs in Norway. As the authors explain, the two countries had very different organ-collecting policies. In Norway collection is highly dependent on kidney donation from patients’ relatives and friends (49% of recipients in 1990), whereas at 2.7%, France has the lowest rate for such donation of all European countries.

It turns out that there are clear ways in which this difference between the two countries is socially constructed. It begins with the fact that French doctors are generally opposed to donation by living donors, which they see as voluntarily harming a healthy individual. This reluctance in France, means the medical establishment hardly encourages kidney donation. In addition, France is well equipped with dialysis machines, meaning there is a tendency to want to make use of existing supply.

Industrialisation of giving

The system for making use of gifted blood has changed dramatically as a result of industrialisation of the process. Steiner explains:

At a time when the problem of donor selection had become particularly acute [1960's], with the introduction of major new techniques for treating collected blood, included pooling (mixing the blood of several thousand donors) and breaking down blood into various stable components (albumin, fibrinogen, immunoglobin, anti-hemophiliac VIII factors), products which themselves gradually came to be categorized as medicines. Indeed, we must distinguish between blood itself, a product which cannot be kept more than a month, and the products yielded by industrial treatment of blood or plasma, which may be kept a year or more. This difference is essential. It was through technological progress and a supply of better-adapted treatments that the industrial world made its entrance into the system of blood collection and diffusion.

This industrialisation driven by technological change has meant that gift-based and market-based systems have become intertwined at the industrial level. Steiner explains:

European countries, most of whose blood collection systems are organized around the unpaid voluntary action principle (the most notable exception is Germany), are in a position to meet domestic need for blood, but not for products like plasma and stable derivatives such as Factor VIII, distributed to hemophiliacs. These products are therefore imported from countries where donors are paid for giving blood. This means that countries with unpaid action systems cannot really see this as a quality that makes them/ more virtuous than countries with paid systems. Importing plasma from the United States amounts to using blood collected in exchange for payment; meanwhile, the importing countries do not want to be responsible for deciding to set up their own paying system (Setbon, 1993, p. 124; Hermitte, 1996, pp. 177-185; Schwartz, 1999, p. 47)

Demographic differences

According to research in Lithuania, Sweden and the US, there seems to be demographic differences between donors who are remunerated and those who are for giving blood. Typically blood donors who are remunerated are majority male, while those blood donors who are non-remunerated are majority female. The non-remunerated tend also to be educated to a higher level and have a higher income.

For those donors who are remunerated, they tend to have a lower income and level of income is more evenly split. Here’s the data from the Lithuania study in more detail. This suggests that the likelihood that you’re able to access giving systems depends on how disadvantaged you are. A question is then- is there a trade off possible between incentives and accessibility of all demographics?

Motivations of blood donors

It’s striking just how many of the discussion points brought out by this research in Lithuania about blood donoring pulls out many of the issues that are typical to volunteering the world over. For example, the importance of being asked to take part, the driver of having blood donoring affect you personally in some way, and the fact that giving blood is actually almost a side effect of a more practical driver (e.g. test a health condition).

According to some researchers [see notes below 1,2,3], the main motivating factor that mobilizes prospective donors is their awareness of the patients’ need for blood in combination to one’s presumption that one day they may also find themselves in need of blood transfusion. Other research findings support the claim that altruism and awareness of the need are not strong enough motivation factors [see notes 4,5]. The present research shows that people donate their blood if they receive a call to do it, are informed of somebody’s vital need for their blood, wish to test their health condition or get some earnings.

Retention of blood donors

It would be interesting to look for more research about what makes people repeat donors and what accounts for the high rate of one off donors. Anecdotally there are changes in how people are donoring blood in the UK, i.e. there are less, regular donors. This seems to chime with the issue generally that patterns of volunteering are changing, becoming more episodic. The research in Lithuania found:

Not all persons who have once donated their blood become repeat donors. Findings of earlier research show that 40 per cent do it as a one-time act [See note 3]. In the Lithuanian case, the greater part of non-remunerated donors comprises persons who did it for the first time. Thus it is really crucial to focus donor recruitment strategies on the transformation of the first timers’ into the repeat ones as well as the retention of the latter [See note 6].

Retention of donors is also largely dependent on donor satisfaction with blood collection services [See note 7]. So it is vital to help them feel at home at blood centres. Another crucial aspect is making donors feel that their blood donations are useful for the community and appreciated by it.

Communication of volunteering and donation

Finally, there’s surely opportunities for working together to continue to develop and build a positive image of volunteering that includes blood donation along with many other kinds of giving and volunteering today. The research in Lithuania noted:

To promote non-remunerated donation, it is essential to build a positive image of the donor in the public and further develop donation as an act of charity. Thus good public relations is a crucial promotional means in blood donor recruitment and retention management. Community participation and involvement in blood donation could also be encouraged by paying public honour to the most active donors and charity events. Another possibility would be to employ mass media in providing information on blood donation and its positive effect on human health as well as the national supplies of blood and its components at national blood collecting centres.

Footnotes

1. Olaiya MA, Alakija A, Ajala A, Olatunji O. Knowledge, attitudes, beliefs and motivations towards blood donations among blood donors in Lagos, Nigeria. Transfusion Medicine. 2004;14:13-17. doi: 10.1111/j.0958-7578.2004.00474.x.

2. Androulaki Z, Merkouris A, Tsouras C, Androulakis M. Knowledge and Attitude Towards Voluntary Blood Donation Among A Sample of Students In TEI Of Crete, Greece. Nurs Web J. 2005. p. 23.

3. Godin G, Sheeran P, Conner M, Germain M, Blondeau D, Gagné , et al. Factors explaining the intention to give blood among the general population. Vox Sanguinis. 2005;89:140. doi: 10.1111/j.1423-0410.2005.00674.x.

4. Nilsson BS. The blood – donation experience: perceived physical, psychological and social impact of blood donation on the donor. Vox Sanguinis. 2003;84:120-128. doi: 10.1046/j.1423-0410.2003.00271.x.

5. Fernandez Montoya A, de Dios Luna del Castillo J, Lopez Berrio A, Rodriguez Fernandez A. Attitudes, beliefs, and motivations in blood donors and non-donors. Sandre . 1996;41:427-40.

6. World Blood Donor Day. http://www.ifrc.org/what/health/blood/index.asp

7. Politis C. Blood donation systems as an integral part of the health system. Arch Hellen Med. 2000;17:354-357.

Further thinking

James Neuberger, Chris Rudge and AC Grayling discuss the reasons why we give and how we can influence altruistic behaviour.

I was listening to this discussion at the RSA ‘Living by giving: Donation and the benefits of altruism’. There’s a point in the discussion where a mother of child saved by donated organs explains how important it was for her to know she had the consent of the giver – before her child received those organs. It’s an important point that explains the difference between giving with and without consent, that’s discussed in the debate about whether we should opt in or opt out of organ donation.

Volunteering is a political act. I don’t mean in the narrow sense, such as volunteering in campaigning or supporting a political party. Volunteering is political in the sense that it has a profound impact on our political economy (our political and economic system).

This phenomenon translates into hot topics in the volunteering world, such as: job substitution of paid staff for volunteers [giving vs exchanging], volunteering in the private sector [giving within a commodity based system], the state’s role in promoting volunteering [state deciding between gifts and commodities] or how volunteering’s contribution to the UK’s economic activity is measured [converting value of gifts into the value of commodities]. These, and other issues, I claim are controversial because volunteering is, by it’s very nature, a political act in that volunteering as an act of giving forms part of a particular kind of political economy: the gift economy. This point is too often overlooked, perhaps because it is too important for volunteering as an issue to be regarded as politically neutral.

For many, the web has led to the development of a new political economy. In fact, this is a broader debate way beyond this post. But it’s pretty clear our society’s factors of production (resources employed to produce goods and services) have been transformed with the web, and there is no shortage of discussion on this. What I want to look at here is how, as the web changes the way we think about political economy, it’s changing the way we think about giving. This has profound implications for volunteering, as a giving activity.

Getting political

As always, I’m interested in how the general debates about the nature of volunteering fit into this bigger picture, as we can learn a lot from these discussions about the web and its effect on political economy. For this post, I wanted to come at the discussion slightly left field to provide a contrast to the usual mainstream discussion. To kick off, I’ve been looking at contributions to this critique of the web-influenced political economy from a neo-Marxist perspective.

This is to contrast many of the more mainstream (many US based) writers about the new economy driven by the web who tend to come at the subject from either a neo-liberal perspective, such as Kevin Kelly, Chris Anderson or Don Tapscott, or with a more social democratic flavour such as Lawrence Lessig or Yochai Benkler. All of whom we’ve mentioned on this blog already.

To put it very simplistically, the ‘right’ generally views the gift economy of the web as providing more opportunities than threats to the current capitalist system. Giving, as an economic model enabled by the web, is something that capitalism can incorporate and subsume. The perspective from the ‘left’ is generally the opposite: the gift economy made possible through the web, ultimately challenges the very nature of capitalism.

As a result, I think, how volunteering engages with the new web-enabled political economy is incredibly politically significant.

Cooperation and Competition

This discussion raises many issues that are very relevant to the way our understanding of volunteering is changing. A great place to start is to dip into the growing body of work from social theorist Christian Fuchs. He’s written the book, ‘Internet and Society: Social Theory in the Information Age‘ (2008).

For Fuchs, there is an antagonism between cooperation and competition (PDF) within ‘transnational informational capitalism’. This tension comes about because within the structure of contemporary capitalism, there’s a germ of a new form of society. Fuchs explains this in the following way:

The productive forces of contemporary capitalism are organized around informational networks. It is due to three specific characteristics of such structures that they come in contradiction with the capitalist relations of production and are a germ form (Keimform) of a society that is based on fully cooperative and socialized means of production:

• Information as a strategic economic resource is globally produced and diffused by networks. It is a good that is hard to control in single places or by single owners.
• Information is intangible. It can easily be copied, which results in multiple ownerships and hence undermines individual private property.
• The essence of networks is that they strive for establishing connections. Networks are in essence a negation of individual ownership and the atomism of capitalism.

These three characteristics are also affecting large not for profit organisations that have been behind a lot of the organised volunteering opportunities. Information is an economic resource that provides many big not for profit organisations with their competitive advantage, and as a result, many have not been as forthcoming in looking to see how such information could be used to encourage collaboration.

Clearly, this is a theory that focuses on the role of information and knowledge producers, and how the means of production are structured as networks. What’s particularly interesting in our discussion on volunteering is how, as Fuchs points out, this new political economy centres on a new relationship between gifts and commodities:

Although the principle of the gift points towards a postcapitalist society, gifts are today subsumed under capitalism and used for generating profit in the Internet economy. The Internet gift economy has a double character: it supports and at the same time undermines informational capitalism. Applications such as file-sharing software question the logic of commodities, whereas platforms such as Google and MySpace are characteristic of the capitalist gift economy.

The volunteering sector is being hugely changed by this idea that actually the role of giving that’s most effective, is that which also happens to meet the corporate interest. On a simple level, that might be corporates sponsoring voluntary sector activity which may influence the nature of the giving activities to a greater or lesser extent. Even accepting free services that are supported by online adverts can lead to altering the sense of the giving or the way the giving activities are perceived. The broader question is: to what degree are the gift and exchange cultures compatible?

Open source advocate Eric Steven Raymond in his article, ‘Homesteading the Noosphere‘ explores how hackers come together and develop gift cultures. Raymond represents this libertarian spirit found in many open source communities coming together through the web. He has an interesting take on understanding why this online gift economy has come about in the first place:

Gift cultures are adaptations not to scarcity but to abundance. They arise in populations that do not have significant material-scarcity problems with survival goods. We can observe gift cultures in action among aboriginal cultures living in ecozones with mild climates and abundant food. We can also observe them in certain strata of our own society, especially in show business and among the very wealthy.

Abundance makes command relationships difficult to sustain and exchange relationships an almost pointless game. In gift cultures, social status is determined not by what you control but by what you give away.

Thus the Kwakiutl chieftain’s potlach party. Thus the multi-millionaire’s elaborate and usually public acts of philanthropy. And thus the hacker’s long hours of effort to produce high-quality open-source code.

I think Raymond is on to something with the connection between abundance and gift economies. But he misunderstands the role of material abundance. The wealthy may give, but it ignores the fact that often their giving is limited because their wealth is wedded to an exchange system. Likewise, it doesn’t explain how many of the most deeply embedded gift economies exist in communities that are materially poor. It’s crucial to understand giving as a response to having access to an abundant means of production, not an abundant material product.

A volunteering equivalent of this idea, is that of Edgar Cahn’s exploration of the ‘core economy’ developed in Time Banking. The concept of the ‘core economy’ was originally coined by Neva Goodwin. It’s this idea that the “ability to care for others is something that all of us have, and this means that in terms of money, it is worth very little”. One reason volunteering develops where and how it does is because it builds on our abundant ability to support and help each other.

It is really important to make the distinction between the abundant existence of a product, and the abundant access to the means of production of the product. There is no guarantee that abundant products will be shared, if there is no accompanying abundant access to the means to make that product. In fact, more often than not, abundant products wind up being scarce when subject to the forces of command economies or exchange economies.

I can think of photographers deliberately destroying copies of their works and running limited edition print runs to maximise the financial value of their work. Conversely, the fact that so many can act to help positive change or volunteer, should not devalue the vital contribution of those who do. For example, often volunteering experience is undervalued by employers when compared to equivalent experience that has been financially remunerated. I guess a Marxist take on this is that employers generally take their lead from exchange value, rather than just use value.

This idea of linking social status to what you give away, than to what you control, is important in distinguishing between exchange relationships and giving relationships. Fuchs distinguishes non-profit gifts and commodities, in relation to exchange and use value. Gifts just have use value and no exchange value.

Volunteering and the voluntary sector have arguably been massively affected by this commodification of goods and services that have traditionally been given as gifts. In a very real sense, in volunteering, we are working out many of the issues that arise where gifts and commodities meet. For example, charging service users for services that are based on giving activities, agreeing a basis for local authority contracts with the voluntary sector, running commercial activities alongside charitable activities, and so on and so on.

Historical context: the case of the Situationists

However, it is really impossible to make much progress understanding the meaning of this debate about gifts and commodities without some historical context. Richard Barbrook has written about the so-called Situationists who believed that everyone could control their own destinies. Wikipedia has this choice summing up of the Situationists connection here: “Drawing from Marx, which argued that under a capitalist society the wealth is degraded to an immense accumulation of commodities, Guy Debord argues that in advanced capitalism, life is reduced to an immense accumulation of spectacles, a triumph of mere appearance where “all that once was directly lived has become mere representation”.

The spectacle, which according to Debord is the core feature of the advanced capitalist societies, has its “most glaring superficial manifestation in the advertising-mass media-marketing complex”. Barbrook writes:

These New Left activists wanted to create opportunities for everyone to express their own hopes, dreams and desires. The Hegelian ‘grand narrative’ would culminate in the supersession of all mediations separating people from each other. Yet, despite their Hegelian modernism, the Situationists believed that the utopian future had been prefigured in the tribal past. For example, tribes in Polynesia organised themselves around the potlatch: the circulation of gifts. Within these societies, this gift economy bound people together into tribes and encouraged cooperation between different tribes. In contrast with the atomisation and alienation of bourgeois society, potlatches required intimate contacts and emotional authenticity. According to the Situationists, the tribal gift economy demonstrated that individuals could successfully live together without needing either the state or the market. After the New Left revolution, people would recreate this idyllic condition: anarcho-communism.

However, the Situationists could not escape from the elitist tradition of the avant-garde. Despite their invocation of Hegel and Marx, the Situationists remained haunted by Nietzsche and Lenin. As in earlier generations, the rhetoric of mass participation simultaneously justified the leadership of the intellectual elite. Anarcho-communism was therefore transformed into the ‘mark of distinction’ for the New Left vanguard. As a consequence, the giving of gifts was seen as the absolute antithesis of market competition. There could be no compromise between tribal authenticity and bourgeois alienation. After the social revolution, the potlatch would completely supplant the commodity.

For the Situationists in the 1960s and 1970s, the gift economy represented the antithesis of capitalism. The two were absolute opposites. But now, particularly with the development of gift economies on the web, it’s clear that there’s a complex relationship between the two. For Barbrook the giving evolving through the web is a more authentic approach to anarcho-communism.

Barbrook argues that the web has grown out of a gift economy of a very different sort. Academics have used and built the internet to share their work and build their reputations. The web has spread out of this function for academics, but also in the very practical way it has depended on developers to have given their time and skills to the process. That the web developed through giving is a contingent happening. It did not have be like this.

In France, the nationalised telephone monopoly has accustomed people to paying for the on-line services provided by Minitel. In contrast, the Net remains predominantly a gift economy even though the system has expanded far beyond the university. From scientists through hobbyists to the general public, the charmed circle of users was slowly built up through the adhesion of many localised networks to an agreed set of protocols.

Crucially, the common standards of the Net include social conventions as well as technical rules. The giving and receiving of information without payment is almost never questioned. Although the circulation of gifts doesn’t necessarily create emotional obligations between individuals, people are still willing to donate their information to everyone else on the Net.

Even selfish reasons encourage people to become anarcho-communists within cyberspace. By adding their own presence, every user contributes to the collective knowledge accessible to those already on-line. In return, each individual has potential access to all the information made available by others within the Net.

The web has been built on the new economy where information is at the centre. For Barbrook giving (as developed on the web) is a natural consequence of its structure (of localised networks and agreed protocols). It’s a semi-conscious kind of giving that doesn’t necessarily create emotional obligations or question why there isn’t a charge attached to information there. The web is a different kind of space. In fact this idea of emotional obligations playing a lesser role might explain why it has been challenging to transfer and evolve many volunteering activities online.

It’s also important to remember that the web economy is built on the value of knowledge. In many cases, it is harder to abstract the human interconnection that’s at the core of much volunteering. Coming back to Christian Fuchs:

“Knowledge is in global network capitalism a strategic economic resource; property struggles in the information society take on the form of conflicts over the public or proprietary character of knowledge. Its production is inherently social, cooperative and historical. Knowledge is in many cases produced by individuals in a joint effort. New knowledge incorporates earlier forms of knowledge; it is coined by the whole history of knowledge. Hence, it is in essence a public good and it is difficult to argue that there is an individual authorship that grounds individual property rights and copyrights. Global economic networks and cyberspace today function as channels of production and diffusion of knowledge commodities; the accumulation of profit by selling knowledge is legally guaranteed by intellectual property rights.”

Fettering the gift economy

Johan Soderberg is another writer who has expanded this discussion of the Marxist critique of the political economy of the web. He talks about the commodification of information itself, and the place of knowledge as the basis for a new kind of gift economy. He pulls out this quote from Christopher May (A Global Political Economy of Intellectual Property Rights: The New Enclosures?):

“The contradiction that lies at the heart of the political economy of intellectual property is between the low to non-existent marginal cost of reproduction of knowledge and its treatment as scarce property”

This contradiction is not just about the low cost of reproduction of knowledge, it’s also because of the increasingly easy access to the means of production of knowledge and it’s treatment as scarce. In fact we’re essentially fettering our knowledge to make it scarce. Back to Fuchs:

“Networks are forms of development as well as fetters of capitalism; paraphrasing Marx one can say that informational capitalism is a point where the means of production have become ˜incompatible with their capitalist integument’ (Das Kapital 1, Marx, 1867: 791).”

In other words, for Fuchs, there’s a fundamental contradiction at the heart of informational capitalism: it needs to both commodify knowledge and gift knowledge. It needs appropriate knowledge to generate exchange value, but at the same time rip down the fetters of knowledge, such as intellectual property rights to maximise the productive capacity of social labour. In much of the voluntary sector, the fetters of knowledge are not normally intellectual property rights, but may perhaps be more akin to bureaucratic method, financial resource and the limitations of partnership working across big not for profits organisations.

Soderberg presents the example that “the free software community provides the first and most complete example of how a collective learning process, communication, or the general intellect, becomes a producing entity in itself. Code is essentially a language, and thus offers a pure model of the network externalities assumption. That assumption, stating that comparability rules over excludability, is a consequence of non-rival goods”.

These thoughts need breaking down.

Network externality is really the idea that a product’s value to a consumer changes as the number of users of the product changes. Take Wikipedia as an example of networked knowledge. It’s clear that it’s value as knowledge increases as more people use it, because more readers generally translate into more contributors to the knowledge, just as Barbrook pointed out in the passage above.

The idea of the ‘general intellect’ is far more problematic, but it links this thinking about knowledge and networks, to Marx’s own thought about the relation between capital and labour. Nate Hawthorne has done a really great summing up of this on his blog, “What in the hell…“:

General intellect is a term used by Marx in the Grundrisse in a section referred to as The Fragment On Machines. In this section Marx speculates on the role of intellect, specifically scientific knowledge and technical expertise, in present and possible future versions of capitalist production. For Marx general intellect essentially resides in fixed capital, in machines and objective factors of production. Thinkers of the late 20th century onward have expanded the concept to refer to the role of intellect within variable capital, that is, skills and knowledges within the bodies and brains of workers and how these capacities relate to capitalist production and radical possibilities. .

Soderberg’s point is that immaterial social labour (e.g. production of knowledge through networks) is making inroads within capitalist production itself, “which needs to utilize the cooperative and communicative capacity of the workforce in order to stay competitive”. In fact, I think there’s a case for saying that immaterial social labour is something that the voluntary sector has been involved in for many years- and has a great deal of experience in.

Coming back to Fuchs it clear that there is a tension that goes way back about knowledge as a gift and knowledge as a commodity: “In society, information can only be produced jointly in cooperative processes, not individually. Hence, Marx argued that knowledge ˜depends partly on the cooperation of the living, and partly on the utilisation of the labours of those who have gone before’ (Marx, 1894: 114). Whenever new information emerges, it incorporates the whole societal history of information: that is, information has a historical character. Hence, information in essence is a public good, freely available to all. But in global informational capitalism, information has become an important productive force that favours new forms of capital accumulation. Information is today not treated as a public good, rather as a commodity. There is an antagonism between information as a public good and as a commodity. ”

Web’s changing giving

There is a lot still to learn and understand about how the web is changing our political economy. For this reason it’s important to still be able to think of the web as something so new and different, that it may just mean that by volunteering we’re engaged in potentially revolutionising our political economy. In this sense volunteering is a political act. For thinkers on the left, just by taking up the challenge and volunteering, volunteers are demonstrating that there is a different way- and perhaps even hinting at a post-capitalist system built on cooperation, rather than competition, and on gifts, rather than commodities. The associated danger on the other hand, is that this volunteering experience becomes corrupted and ultimately subservient to the drive to commodify our social relations.

This perspective also suggests that those involved in volunteering need to begin this work of thinking through the implications of how the web is changing our conception of political economy, and how it is changing the way we give. And at least on this point, I think there’s agreement from both the ‘right’ and the ‘left’.

We need to think this through anew. Volunteering is entering new territory.

As John Perry Barlow states in his Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace: “Your legal concepts of property, expression, identity, movement, and context do not apply to us. They are based on matter, There is no matter here. Our identities have no bodies, so, unlike you, we cannot obtain order by physical coercion.”

This video based on audio recordings of philosopher Alan Watts is a great step into this debate about the role of education in society. It’s a passionate topic of conversation that’s been around certainly since the times of Aristotle (another interesting link here) and the other Greek thinkers.

As Watts so neatly demonstrates; when we focus on education as a means to something else, we can lose sight of the bigger picture. It’s a profound tension between needing a purpose to provide us with meaning, and having the means to achieve our chosen purpose. Or to paraphrase Watts, life is like music- we’re supposed to dance and sing as the music plays, not wait for the final movement of the symphony.

I’m interested in how this debate in education can help us to think more about accepting volunteering programmes as a means to an end (specifically helping to achieve the organisation’s mission), and balancing it with the approach that enjoys volunteering for what it is for the volunteer- not just what it facilitates for the organisation.

There are many parallels between education and volunteering which justify studying the education debate. The primary one is how education, like volunteering, taps into deeper social values that make us who we are.

Social values

Deeper social values play a role joining us as individuals with us as members of a society. Getting back to Aristotle:

There remains to be discussed the question whether the happiness of the individual is the same as that of the state, or different. Here again there can be no doubt — no one denies that they are the same. [Aristotle, Politics (Book 7)]

In other words, there’s a fundamental link between the happiness or wellbeing of the individual and that of the polis or state. Paul Gibbs in his article ‘Isn’t higher education employability?‘ (PDF) provides a clear example of developing what the implications of Aristotle’s thoughts mean for the debate on education today. Gibbs argues that:

Employability is not the end of education, but a competency of the skilled authentic social agent. I see no difficulty in employability skills being incorporated within a more general set of aims for higher education, but I am concerned that we might instrumentalise our education system to such an extent that employability becomes the prime purpose of higher education, satisfying only often ill-informed and morally base notions of what is an adequate education by reference to a measurable return on financial investment.

Paul Gibbs takes us through why the purpose of education is more than just boosting the employability of students. In fact, he’s got reservations about employability as a concept: it’s (i) a relative term weighted towards employers, (ii) generally poorly understood, and (iii) presupposes a single ideology that takes its justification from the economic. Gibbs suggests a more balanced approach to understanding education as mercantile, civic and contemplative, to satisfy the moral and economic needs of the community.

Reflecting on this, volunteering has been put under similar pressures. Frequently employability is cited as a particular outcome that volunteering programmes aim to meet. Perhaps it would be as well to ponder on some of Gibbs’ reservations and how relevant they are. For example, do employers carry more weight than volunteer managers or the volunteers themselves?

Martha Nussbaum made one of the strongest defences in recent years of this kind of liberal approach to education evoked by Gibbs above,  in her 1997 book ‘Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defence of Reform in Liberal Education‘. She argues that the purpose of liberal education is to cultivate humanity. According to Nussbaum, humanity can be cultivated in three ways:

• The first is the capacity for critical self-examination and critical thinking about one’s own culture and traditions.
• The second is the capacity to see oneself as a human being who is bound to all humans with ties of concern.
• The third is the capacity for narrative imagination – the ability to empathize with others and to put oneself in another’s place.

Clearly many volunteering roles meet these different capacities needed for cultivating humanity cited by Nussbaum and volunteering itself, comes within this conception of liberal education. Volunteering through hands on activities with others with different cultures and traditions enables volunteers to develop their critical thinking about their own culture. Volunteering is built on achieving social impacts and meeting identified needs in society so enabling volunteers to understand how they are practically ‘bound to all humans with ties of concern’. Finally, volunteering brings volunteers in contact with others in society they might not ordinarily meet, and in a specific context or narrative determined by the group or organisation they are volunteering with.

Often opposition to this approach to liberal education comes from vocationalism. To a certain extent, this started with the writings of philosopher and educational reformer John Dewey. In 1916 he wrote in Democracy and Education about the place of vocational aims in education:

A calling is also of necessity an organizing principle for information and ideas; for knowledge and intellectual growth… The vocation acts as both magnet to attract and as glue to hold. Such organization of knowledge is vital, because it has reference to needs; it is so expressed and readjusted in action that it never becomes stagnant. No classification, no selection and arrangement of facts, which is consciously worked out for purely abstract ends, can ever compare in solidity or effectiveness with that knit under the stress of an occupation; in comparison the former sort is formal, superficial, and cold.

Dewey spoke a lot about occupations in a broad sense, including both professional and amateur pursuits, and also other parts of life such as being a parent. Applying vocations to education, rather than constraining education in arbitrary and narrow ways, Dewey argued that it brought education to life by making it relevant for life.

In more recent times, this vocationalist argument has resurfaced in different guises. In particular in the debate over the workings of publicly-financed schools. This argument sees much of the education system as irrelevant and impractical. It does not equip students with the technical skills and experience they require in the world today. At a time of high costs and competition for resources, the case for why education needs to be efficient and practical is clearly a persuasive argument to make. But it’s a view, as Robert Sherman explains, that sees business, industry and technology as the primary forces changing society. Educating students in specific careers, risks feeding these particular forces, rather than enabling students to cope with them.

As we debate further the role of education, we discover that this debate is clearly linked to the discussion on the meaning of work itself. David Corson in the first chapter of the book ‘Education for Work‘ cites different trends affecting the family and the home, that have opened up a gap between them and the world of work.

the workplace has become separated from the home; occupational roles have become distinct from kin based roles and relationships; labor market values have penetrated into family decisions about the future of offspring; parents have come to see that children’s job prospects are far removed from any form of socialization that they can possibly receive within the family and parents are not usually placed to make the social connections necessary to put their children in touch with work that might suit and satisfy their wants and talents.

These are trends that have profound implications for education, but they also would seem to have implications for volunteering. For example, this argument could be used to suggest that these forces separating work from home and the family, has been the basis for the growth in formal volunteering over the same period. For example, as people have learnt to rely less on family and home to make social connections, so people have become more used or habituated to relying on, both as a provider of opportunities to do social good and as a provider of services from the voluntary sector. Giving activities have moved from the home and the family, to more formal settings such as established not-for-profit organisations.

Corson suggests a distinction between ‘occupational work’ and ‘recreational work’. Work is a means to an end, while recreation is an end in itself. Work is a “purposeful activity performed by people in producing goods or services of value, whether for remuneration or not” (Dimensions of Work- Nels Anderson- 1964).

Work becomes a means to an end when it is performed in an occupational role as the work activity of a job. Occupational work is that variety of work that is instrumental to some other goal (usually the remuneration of workers or the survival of themselves and their societies). Recreation work is ‘voluntary in every respect, for it is of the nature of recreation that it ceases to exist for people compelled to pursue it’.

This simple distinction between two types of work from the 1960′s explains one fundamental tension in understanding volunteering today. That is volunteering fits into both camps: at times it’s closer to occupational work and becomes a means to an end, and at other times it’s closer to recreational work and is an end in itself.

This very brief tour then of the debate on the role of education, is never far removed from the parallel debates on the role of volunteering and on the role of work.

A couple of weeks ago now I was at the Volunteer Management Conference organised by Volunteering England at Warwick University. I remember Mark Goldring, Chief Executive of Mencap, explaining how it was important to ensure that volunteers and staff understood how they together contribute to furthering the organisation’s mission. This is a key insight into how a clearly articulated mission communicated and owned across an organisation can be a point of unity between paid staff and volunteers. But the message here is also that this route to unity clearly puts volunteering in the ‘occupational work’ camp.

One question this and the general debate of education poses volunteering is: whether unity is possible between paid staff and volunteers, whether professionalisation of those responsible for an organisation’s volunteer management is possible, if we insist that volunteering is also recreational, not just occupational, and that volunteering is not just a means to an end, but also an end in itself?

Context

The group came together through Twitter and the local Devon Social Media Cafe, a monthly meet up for social media users in Devon. The group took up the challenge of organising a local Twestival and worked on its preparation in a matter of six weeks or so. Here’s an explanation of what Twestival is according to Twestival.com:

Twestival„¢ (or Twitter Festival) uses social media for social good. All of the local events are organized 100% by volunteers and 100% of all ticket sales and donations go direct to projects.

By the end of the odyssey, the group in Plymouth had raised almost £6,000 for Concern- making the Plymouth Twestival the third largest in terms of amount raised of all the local Twestivals around the UK in spring 2010. An amazing result, all the more so considering it was the first time the group had organised the Twitter associated fundraising extravaganza. Over 100 people attended the event at Plymouth Argyle.

Highlights included:

• an auction hosted by local celebrity auctioneer Graham Barton (from BBC series ‘Homes Under the Hammer’)
• performances from local musicians Francis and the Drakes, Kitty and the Lost Boys and the Delahays
• free pizza laid on by Domino’s Pizza Plymouth
• and a chance to play with a giant Scalextric set thanks to local company What a Giggle

Learning what’s behind this volunteering success

What follows are thoughts that come out of discussion with Chris Penberthy about his work as part of the group behind the Plymouth Twestival (March 2010).

Organising any Twestival is an incredible challenge. Twestivals are driven by volunteers and are typically organised in short periods of time, powered by the volunteers’ own resources and resourcefulness. What follows is an attempt to identify the reasons for the spectacular success of the group in Plymouth and this new model of volunteer engagement that’s being thrashed out by local groups running Twestival events all over the world.

Recruitment (or how the group’s engagement began)

In terms of volunteers, there were around 10-12 people who helped out in various ways, with a core group of 5-6 people. People joined the group, not so much because they’d seen the volunteering opportunity advertised, but because they already had a contact with someone in the group or because they were drawn in by the Twestival event itself.

The initial contact between the group members themselves and or with the Twestival event in Plymouth were almost all made informally through online social media, in particular Twitter. This meant that the group came from a very diverse range of backgrounds, united by social media and by the links with the local area.

In the beginning of the planning process, it was suggested that members of the group adopt specific roles. However, in the end, people rejected this in favour of a looser, more informal approach with each person doing what they could. Public facing roles (e.g. press, sponsorship, general enquiries, etc.) were assigned to different members of the group for pragmatic communications reasons, so the general public knew who to approach with a specific enquiry. However, behind the scenes, most members of the group ended up helping across a range of different ‘roles’ or tasks on an as needed basis. Although each member brought their own skills and experience, volunteers were not recruited on the basis of formal qualifications.

Interestingly, the vast majority had not volunteered formally before and in fact many didn’t consider their involvement with Twestival as volunteering, rather they were simply helping out with the task at hand. As a result, searching for a volunteering opportunity would have been unlikely to have been a point of entry for them had they been advertised on a volunteering opportunity website like Do-it or Volunteer Match.

Volunteers could come through the Plymouth Twestival page. But many came through simple conversation on Twitter simply tweeting or DM’ing a member of the group or the main Plymouth Twestival twitter account.

As the date of the event got closer, some formal volunteer recruitment to get help with stewarding the event was attempted through local student volunteering services. This recruitment approach didn’t result in any volunteers. In the end, this role was filled by different members of the group who helped out with stewarding on an ad hoc basis on the day itself.

Ripping up the rule book

In many ways, it was a case of ripping up the rule book on traditional volunteer management and starting again in a very different way. Chris enjoyed how this allowed the group to focus on the needs at hand, liberated from the burden of worrying about getting the policies in place beforehand. This more informal approach was possible for a number of reasons.

The group came together for a very specific purpose and was clearly time limited. The date of Twestival is fixed across the world. The group was small which enabled management to be very lightweight and informal. There was strong feeling of serendipity in the way the challenge was approached, rather than planning every last detail.

This should not in any way downplay the enormous amount of work and organisation that took place in the preparation of the event. However, it’s important to note that this work was carried out because members of the group proactively took responsibility for different tasks, rather than relied on tasks to be assigned to them.

There was also a balance of power in the sense in which all group could shape what happened and have an impact on the development of the event.

The gift relationships that bonded the group were never lost from sight, which meant people had flexibility to carry out the tasks when they could based on their actual capacity. The only pressure was the pressure people put on themselves. The group’s expectations were based on the assumption that each was delivering the best they could, not against unrealistic or imposed targets.

It was people getting together in their spare time and as a result one important ingredient in the mix was the clear sense of fun in which the group took on the challenge. This playfulness in spirit was driven by the group members themselves, but also through a sense of good-natured rivalry with events being organised in different parts of the South-West such as Bristol and Exeter .

People were motivated by the fact they were clearly autonomous, and had a lot of freedom to do what they wanted. There was no ambition from the central organisers of Twestival to control or dictate how this group in Plymouth (or any other) should approach the challenge of fundraising for the internationally nominated charity Concern. There was also no centralised centrepiece, as is often the case with national fundraisers driven by mass media. Absence of any national centrepiece provides the Plymouth group with the space to create it’s own distinctive style which perhaps explains why it is such a powerful motivator of volunteer engagement.

It’s also important not to forget how the very social aspect of the volunteering, not only drew people to get involved, but also meant that the group stayed together up to the event itself. In fact, the group continues to meet together socially now after Twestival, which gives you an idea of the strength of the relationships and level of companionship within the group. It’s a clear example of how links built online can contribute to building social capital in local communities.

One reason why people’s commitment to the group grew was because it’s designed in a way that means volunteers’ personal interests are compatible with a broader collective interest. Twestival comes with a clear purpose or target for social impact: fundraise for a good cause. But at the same time, it leaves plenty of space for volunteers to express their personal freedom through their volunteering.

As a result volunteers were free to play out their involvement to fundraise for the cause at hand, in a way that often brought the happy side effect of meeting some of their own more personal interests. For example, through the volunteering activity many group members discovered contacts with others in the local area that could well prove useful in their wider lives as members of the community. Another example was that through their support and association with the event, volunteers could get a certain amount of valuable publicity and help build their own professional reputation.

This reason this was possible was again due in part to the informality of the event’s organisation. Each member of the group’s involvement was based not formally representing another organisation, rather people were involved more in a personal capacity. In addition, because the event is time limited and the beneficiary alternates (the next Twestival will be fundraising for a local charity) it reduces concerns about a conflict of interest arising between the fundraising purpose of the group and individual personal interests.

Limitations of informality

One specific limitation for the group in its informality was in cash handling. This limitation was overcome in the first instance because there were very few requirements to handle cash. Moreover, much of the support was in gifts in kind, many costs such as expenses were covered by each individual, and online payment methods avoids the need to a large extent for cash handling.

Technical tools

The group used the following social media tools:

• Twestival blog
• Twitter account for Plymouth Twestival
• Facebook page – public facing
• Huddle group for password protected discussion
• Good old fashioned email

Conclusions

Interestingly, Twestival clearly taps into the three key motivations cited by Daniel Pink in his latest book Drive: being autonomous, achieving mastery and having purpose. The example of the group in Plymouth clearly demonstrates the importance of having a sense of purpose and feeling independent were key factors in terms of motivating the members volunteering for the event. If the group continues to take on and organise further events, mastery and the challenge of getting better and improvements could well kick in too.

Here’s a summary of some of the learnings from this Twestival for involving volunteers:

1. Time limited event – time limits commitment and provides impetus to organisation
2. Clear collective purpose – fundraise for a good cause
3. Twestival organised locally, not nationally – centralisation is at a minimum
4. Social impact centrally defined, personal freedom undefined (how you volunteer is down to you
5. Twestival provides space for local autonomy, scope to mastery as a group and a clear central purpose (in this case fundraise for Concern)
6. Engagement driven by desire to be part of a community, rather than volunteering in a particular role
7. Group was largely self-organised, rather than centralised by any particular member of the group
8. Engagement sustained by bonds through social media, being from the same local area and volunteering in a personal capacity, rather representing an adopted organisation

Thanks again to Chris Penberthy for help with this post!

Further reading

Twestival March 2010 from Machine Media on Vimeo.

Official Plymouth Twestival video by Machine Media.