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?

Plymouth Twestival organisers Photo: Rod Gonzalez

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.

The frontier between what is and isn’t volunteering covered by the term ‘informal volunteering’ belies a deeper question about the structure of social relationships. This is certainly not a new issue. But the development of the online web as a means of communication, now brings this problem into sharper focus. It may even be offering new insights into how social networks impact on how we give.

The other day I came across Kevin Harris’s blog on neighbourhoods. I read a post he made about the ‘micro-formalisation of neighbourhood relations‘:

Here’s a neighbour at the door, come in my dear, asking me to fill in name and telephone number as someone to contact in case of need. The form is for local Age Concern drop-in sessions, which sound brilliant – all the sensitive flexibility we expect from local AC activities, and she’s raring to go.

Presumably someone will now take my contact details and key them into a database, digitally fixing that relationship of ‘neighbour-who-can-be-contacted-in-case-of-need’ into a format that can be referred to, passed-on, printed out. I don’t have a problem with that. But I wonder if we can expect more of this sort of micro-formalising of essentially informal relations, as the need is recognised to establish a stable platform for informal local support?

This trend that Kevin Harris calls micro-formalisation, seems to me to have implications for how we understand the kind of volunteering we often label as ‘informal’. Informal volunteering is defined in the Citizenship Survey in the UK as: “Giving unpaid help as an individual to people who are not relatives”.

It’s problematic to distinguish between informal volunteering and neighbourliness, as pointed out by NFPSynergy amongst others. It’s also difficult to draw the line between informal and formal volunteering, as it can over-simplify what defines a ‘formal’ group, club or organisation- witness the UK Government’s problems in drawing the line (PDF) as to who should be registered with the new Independent Safeguarding Authority (see R.Singleton’s report, P.11).

The growth of the social web is really forcing us to rethink how we conceive of formalised social relations (that also receive the lion’s share of research and attention). ‘Micro-formalisation’ is a good way of describing what is happening at the moment as we seek to apply the power of the web to the level of neighbours. The inevitable result is that more and more of our social relationships with those around us, become mediated (formalised and structured) by the web. One of the latest examples is NeighborGoods that started in California late 2009.

Right, hold that thought.

A guy called Jaron Lanier was in the UK recently. He’s someone who’s closely associated with the notion of ‘virtual reality’ (he basically coined the term) and he’s been involved in thinking about open culture associated with the web since it’s earliest days. He’s been on a epic journey. Compare, for example, his way of talking about technology on Charlie Rose in 1993, and then at the RSA in Feb 2010.

In his book just out, ‘You Are Not a Gadget’, he argues that the current social web (web 2.0) undervalues academic and artistic achievement and that free content is a setback. Moreover, his contention is that at it’s heart, ideas like web 2.0 and singularity are wrong because they equate humans with machines. Lanier’s point is that we must keep humans at the centre of our thinking and not worship technology as we might a mythical being.

If the only way of supporting culture is through third party advertising, Lanier, a talented musician, is concerned that this accommodation of advertising degrades the worth of the culture and intellectual produce that we seek to share. He also worries that if giving is collectivised, as it is on Wikipedia for example, that this lowers the cultural and intellectual value of what each individual can share of themselves.

These ideas of micro-formalisation and the humanist critique of the social web, provide the background to two emergent world views of the web and how it may be influencing the way we give.

Two world views of a web for giving

One of these views is revolutionary, the other revelatory. They’re not mutually exclusive, but on different ends of one long continuum.

Vision One: The Revolution

This world view believes in the power of technology to fundamentally change social relations. Just as we are witnessing something radically new and unprecedented in the technology of the web, so the social web represents a fundamental change in the way we relate together socially. Our technology is a means to an end: the meaning of technology is in its practical application.

This idea is as ubiquitous as the web itself. For example, take how the BBC, with user input, could uncontroversially name its series on the web: ‘The Virtual Revolution: How 20 Years of The Web Has Reshaped Our Lives’.

It’s close to the Google way of seeing the web, i.e. that information, whether offline or otherwise off the web, is there to be organised and made available on the web. It is simply a technological challenge, as opening access to information always trumps closed access or no access.  In Google’s corporate philosophy it states:

There’s always more information out there…

Our researchers continue looking into ways to bring all the world’s information to people seeking answers

Indexing the world through the web is like structuring the world in the image of the web. It’s structure in the name of openness and efficiency. Part of this process is to chop big things into smaller things to make the reconfiguration process quicker and more efficient. For example, crowdsourcing, is a process that breaks tasks down into their component bits and then shares them so that the power of the ‘network effect‘ can be brought to bear on the challenge in hand.

This world view of the web argues that this effectively amounts to something so new that it is revolutionary, ushering in a new order of social relationships, including how we give to each other.

But what are the problems with this view? Well, it tends to be a technocentric way of approaching problems that are essentially social. In John Brockman’s book back in 1996, ‘Digerati: Encounters with the Cyber Elite‘, Lanier questions the merits of such an approach to information:

Do we think of computers as things that exist in their own right, or do we think of them as conduits between us? We should treat computers as fancy telephones, whose purpose is to connect people. Information is alienated experience. Information is not something that exists. Indeed, computers don’t really exist, exactly; they’re only subject to human interpretation. This is a strong primary humanism I am promoting. As long as we remember that we ourselves are the source of our value, our creativity, our sense of reality, then all of our work with computers will be worthwhile and beautiful.

An example of this putting the needs of technology before the source of the value of technology is the debate about the role of public and private spheres of life in a webbed world.  When technology dissolves obstacles to opening up access to information from institutions and individuals, social obstacles to openness, such as secrecy and privacy, come under pressure. Depending on your point of view, this may well be a price worth paying. But as AC Grayling argues, “We have surrendered our right to privacy to technology”:

Privacy is indeed a right. It is more: it is an essential. Private life, a margin of inviolability for our thoughts, feelings, intimacies, reflections, anxieties, our hopes and nascent plans, and our recoveries from the abrasions of life, are fundamentals of personal and psychological health.

In fact, it’s not so much privacy that’s at stake, it’s the right to live life in unstructured, informal, unmediated settings. More specifically for this post, the argument for privacy also effectively questions the assumption that structured giving, means more giving.

Vision Two: The Revelation

The alternative world view sees a brave new world through revelation, rather than revolution. The web is revealing structures of social relationships that previously existed, albeit at a deeper level. With the existence of the web, these structures or networks are more readily visible and more easily empirically knowable. Our technology is an end in itself: technological development is an expression of what it means to be human.

As Kevin Kelly writes in his upcoming book The Technium that we need to broaden the way we think about technology, past just gadgets and hardware, to anything useful that a mind makes: like the law, writing and many other things developed by human civilisations.

The greatest technology that humans have ever invented is humanity itself. We domesticated ourselves. We turned ourselves into part of the technium. We cannot live as a species, we cannot live with out technology.

Take our example from the beginning of this post about understanding how the development of social networks from social media is formalising previously informal neighbourly activities.

By tracking and recording activity increasingly publicly and openly, the web is making these activities more visible and providing empirical evidence. As Kevin Harris puts it: “digitally fixing relationships”. This is increasingly prevalent as barriers to entry to the web decrease, and use of the social web becomes more and more common. Through online social networks, we’re increasingly aware of our friends’ networks, and our friends’ friends’ networks and so on.

This revelation is like an awakening consciousness. As Daniel Dennett put it back in 1999:

The planet has finally grown its own nervous system: us.

Dennett was looking at the issue of climate change and how the development of science was changing the way we understood ourselves and our relationship to our surroundings and each other.

James Fowler and Nicholas Christakis in their new book ‘Connected‘ look at the way our social networks influence our lives, from health, emotional wellbeing through to how altruistic we are. They argue that “connection and contagion are so fundamentally rooted in our evolutionary psychology that they carry over even to very modern aspects of human life – including email, blogs, and social networking sites”.

Fowler and Christakis’s data that has been built up over many years seems to suggest that ‘real world’ social networks effect us in different ways:

• Induction – the domino effect what one person does influences what someone else does who is close to them
• Homophily – we get close to people who do similar things to us, preferentially forming ties with others based on habits
• Confounding – both people connected share an exposure to some other factor that causes both things to happen at the same time

Using different statistical techniques they’ve unpicked the impact of each. In the study below looking at happiness in face-to-face networks blue indicates the least happy and yellow indicates the happiest people (green are in between):

This diagram (below) shows an ingenious experiment using data from Facebook that measured happiness by looking at whether individuals were smiling in their profile picture. Both diagrams suggest that there is clustering between those who are happy (smilers) and those who are sad.

Fowler and Christakis’s work identified three different kinds of friendships which helped identify which relationships had most influence. Mutual friendship (both regard each other as a friend), ego friendship (you regard them as a friend, but they don’t see you as a friend), and alter friendships (they regard you as a friend, but you don’t see them as a friend).

They’ve demonstrated that mutual friendships affect you most, next ego friendships affect you a bit and then alter friendships don’t affect you at all. Incidentally, this fits the model used by Twitter of mutual followers, followers and following.

What is really surprising is how people at three degrees of separation can still affect your health, emotional wellbeing or taste in films. That’s to say, as a rule of thumb (there are exceptions), your happiness is related to your friend’s, friend’s, friends. Online social networks are simply revealing a social network effect that has always been present, even though it’s been harder to detect in the past. Nicholas Christakis explains it in the following way:

“We form social networks because the benefits of a connected life outweigh the costs. If I was always violent towards you, or gave you bad germs, or made you sad, or gave you misinformation, you would cut the ties with me and the network would disintegrate. So the flow of good and desirable things is required to sustain and nurture the network. And in turn, the network is required for the flow of good and desirable things like happiness, or altruism, or love, or ideas. In fact, I think there is a phenomenally deep connection between networks and goodness. The reason we create networks is to create and sustain all kinds of good and desirable properties.”

Christakis even suggests that social networks are like a super organism. They have a certain coherence, identity, they can reproduce and survive, they are fairly resistant to injury, they have their own memory and sense of purpose. It’s interesting to ponder the parallel’s with Dennett’s idea of humans as the planet’s nervous system and Kelly’s idea of humans inventing humanity.

Social networks influence giving

Fowler and Christakis’s most recent piece of research (PDF) has looked at how networks affect giving: ‘Cooperative behavior cascades in human social networks’. They analysed results of experiments based on the Public goods game. It’s a game where if everybody gives their tokens to the collective good of the group, they’re each rewarded and make a profit. However, if fellow gamers don’t give, and you do give to the group, you can end up making a loss.

Fowler and Christakis’s work demonstrates that each individual’s tendency to give is affected by what the people in their own personal social network do- even those separated by up to three degrees of separation.

[These] results show experimentally that such cascades (connection between people at degrees of separation) can occur in a controlled environment where people are making decisions about giving to others. Other researchers have shown that giving behavior can spread from person to person in natural settings, whether in workplace donations (PDF) to charity or the decision to donate organs.

This growing awareness of how we are influenced by social networks is an example of how technology is revelatory, rather than revolutionary. It is revealing how technology is making us more conscious of our social relations and how we are influenced by them. This increasing formalisation of our social relations by the web, such as giving activities like volunteering, is not so much a brave new world, as it is a new opportunity to raise our consciousness of who we are and how we give.

Further reading

“Nicholas Christakis turns the notion of the self-directed individual on its head, and shows us the extraordinary power of social networks”. – at RSA in London, Feb 25th 2010.

“Digital guru Jaron Lanier delivers a call to arms against digital collectivism and proposes more productive ways technology might interact with our culture”. – at the RSA, London – 1st Feb, 2010

TEDxAmsterdam: Kevin Kelly from TEDxAmsterdam on Vimeo.

“What does technology mean in our lives? That’s the question Kevin Kelly explored in his new talk. Kelly presented a new definition of technology: ˜anything useful invented by a mind’ – whether it be a hammer or the rule of law. So technology is more than gadgets; it’s part of a great story that started long ago, an extension of life and it is moving through us.”

Another way of looking at the discussion about whether volunteering is a means to an end or an end in itself, is to look at whether:

• volunteering has an intrinsic value, and so knowing whether a given activity is or isn’t volunteering is important;
• or, whether volunteering activities don’t have intrinsic value, and can only prove their worth in terms of their impact

Intrinsic value?

Is volunteering fundamentally good, i.e. its goodness is how we define whether it is volunteering or not? If it’s not fundamentally good, it’s not volunteering. Or can we only really talk about volunteering being good in terms of what it specifically aims to bring about or achieves?

Just as with giving, we can give in an effort to achieve a particular end, but we can also give for the sake of giving. There is an intrinsic value to giving.

Esoteric? Volunteering is a giving activity and as a result everyone fighting to promote and support volunteering wrestles with this question of how we value it.

Take my favourite counterpoint to volunteering: fundraising. Similar in the sense that it is also based on giving activities and different in the sense that its focus is on financial capital, not social capital.

Fundraising,  is overwhelmingly seen as a means to an end. Although, I guess one exception might be almsgiving, where making donations comes close to being a good in itself. Fundraising as a ‘means to an end’, has no need to prove its intrinsic worth. It’s worth such as it is, is seen in terms of what it achieves and intends to achieve for the mission or cause it’s employed to support.

Volunteering’s merit is also dependent on the merit of the mission it supports, but beyond this, we seek to justify the value of volunteering in and of itself. At a minimum, it’s possible to imagine volunteering’s merit, regardless of what we think of the mission or cause the volunteering is supporting.

Lesser spotted mountain meerkats

A fictional example might be volunteering to save the lesser spotted mountain meerkat from extinction. Whether or not we believe in the merit of the cause or the actual impact on the fate of the mountain meerkat, volunteering in the name of mountain meerkat protection has value simply because it is volunteering.

Volunteering has value independent of its purported aim. Volunteering regardless of its aim has value in how it boosts a volunteer’s self-esteem, develops personal skills and builds social capital, amongst many other myriad well-documented benefits.

This is obviously not to argue that the value of volunteering is not increased even more when it can be demonstrated that it has an impact beyond those directly involved in the volunteering activity itself. But it is to argue that volunteering has value independent of its impact on its stated cause, unlike fundraising. Raising £50 for the mountain meerkat, which in fact does zilch in the way of protecting mountain meerkats has no value at all. Volunteering for the mountain meerkat, e.g. campaigning, educating or informing the general public, which in fact turns out to have zilch impact in protecting mountain meerkats still has a value as it taps into deeper social values that make us who we are, such as empowerment, education and community.

It should be noted that in this example we’re talking about simply raising the money, not how it is raised. Much fundraising is done through volunteering, so it’s important to distinguish between the value of volunteering to fundraise (and other activities that are typically associated with fundraising) which taps into the deeper social values mentioned above, and the value of raising money per se (a means to an end).

This brings us to the point about the form the volunteering takes. The value of volunteering in itself, does depend heavily on the nature of the activity. Different types of volunteering can certainly have varying levels of benefits to the volunteers and others connected with the volunteering, stopping short of the impact on the ultimate beneficiaries (in this case the mountain meerkats).

This is why the question of how you define volunteering is so hotly debated. The controversy is in the confusion between volunteering’s implicit value, independent of its explicit aim (e.g. to protect mountain meerkats). This confusion can lead to exploitation and manipulation of volunteers and beneficiaries. Why else would we care about whether something is volunteering or not? This is not a debate about semantics in other words.

An activity may help the mountain meerkats but may be detrimental to the volunteers themselves.  For instance, those volunteering may be obligated to carry out an activity, it may be detrimental to their self esteem, it may be dividing local communities, it may be negatively affecting the volunteers personal development, and so on. When volunteering causes harm to those involved in the volunteering, it’s may be because of poor management, or it may be because what is described as volunteering, isn’t volunteering at all.

In this way, the debate about the value of giving activities can often appear to be a debate about the definition of volunteering. My point is that this debate continues to be as controversial as it is, because we’re all trying to work out how forms of volunteering are related to the underpinning values. It’s much more than simply trying to come up with a technical definition that covers all the bases.

Hold that thought for a moment.

Definitions

The issue of how we define volunteering is one of the hottest topics in volunteer management. Many are exhausted by the perennial question that never seems to go away: what is a volunteer? What is volunteering?

What other professions are faced with the same issue as volunteer managers whose very basis for existing is called into question every ten minutes?

Do fundraisers continually question the root definition of fundraising? It’s methods may be, but not its raison d’etre.

Do medical professionals spend as much energy questioning the definition of being a doctor? No. So, what’s going on with volunteer management?

If you’re not already well-versed in the arguments, Susan Ellis’s compilation of definitions of volunteering on Energize is a good place to get an overview on this debate.

General moral values and technical, practical descriptions

I think part of the issue with the definition debate is because we haven’t settled the broader point about context. There’s no consensus on where to situate volunteering on this route between objective technical descriptions and subjective moral values. We’re not sure whether it’s a generic term or a specialist term.

At it’s most generic, volunteering is built on a complex web of cultural and moral values, in much the same way as the concept of giving is. For example, volunteering can be a way of life, an approach to work or a philosophy.

At it’s most specialist, it’s a pay grade, a technical term with very practical descriptions. For example, you don’t receive money beyond out-of-pocket expenses, you do something of social benefit, etc.

On the whole, professions that succeed in establishing a consensus around a technical and objective definition, can go beyond the more general and subjective moral values underpinning it.

We can all agree on a technical definition of a doctor that goes beyond the broader values it’s built on. It’s the same with fundraising. There’s a technical defintion, that enjoys a consensus beyond the moral and ethical controversies that fundraising can invoke.

However, this is not the case with volunteering. Here there is no technical definition that has superceded the values volunteering is based on. This is because volunteering is as much a technical means to achieve a particular end, as it is about the values that volunteering is built on that make it an end in itself.

Volunteering: value-laden term

Take politics for example. Political parties have fundraisers, but not volunteer managers. Terrorists can fundraise, but if they call their recruits volunteers, we balk at that description because we can not distinguish between the values of what makes a volunteer a volunteer and the technical description of a volunteer. As Andy Fryar puts it in e-Volunteerism back in 2003:

While I have never been a fan of placing volunteering into a ˜box’ and labelling it in any specific way, the thought of suicide bombers being branded as volunteers was a stretch, even for my way of thinking.

In Northern Ireland similar discussion and argument has taken place about how the word volunteer is used. One example of this controversy was when the Commission for Victims and Survivors released a statement in 2008 which spoke of an “IRA volunteer” killed “on active service”. The Newsletter quoted William Frazer of FAIR:

Are they saying that IRA members were volunteers and therefore suggesting that in acting voluntarily they are somehow honourable and even of a higher standard than soldiers or policemen and women who took home a wage to stand in the face of these terrorists?

This quote demonstrates why volunteer is controversial- it is loaded with values- and can’t be used as a technical term. A comment on the website puts the alternative way of interpreting the word volunteer:

The term “volunteer” indicates only that they were in voluntary service. This means they were neither conscripts, enlistees bound to service for a term certain nor paid professionals.

Part of this discussion includes the context in which volunteer is a technical term: the military context. The fact that there are separate technical definitions of the word volunteer makes the issue that bit more complicated. Perhaps values are still brought into the picture because they are useful for helping to separate these different kinds of volunteering. The problem is that values are subjective, making it hard to build a consensus around a more technical definition. At the same time, volunteering is emotive, is inspiring and arouses passions because it’s values are so close to the surface.

Susan Ellis offers a technical distinction between volunteering in and out of a military context (“Not everything that’s voluntary is volunteering, particularly in a free society”).

Going further, there’s evidence that because volunteering involves a value-judgement, people are hesitant to describe what they do as volunteering.  Interesting recent research (PDF) by Christine Reilly, Volunteer Development Scotland, Something that others do: applying personal experience to established definitions of volunteering“, suggests that people are reluctant to describe what they do as volunteering because they see it as ‘something others do’. They are often more likely to describe their own volunteering activity in more personal terms, less value laden terms, e.g. just helping out those around me. Here’s one quote cited by the research:

“I don’t have any experience of volunteering I don’t think. Maybe a group when I was twenty, but I wouldn’t have said it was volunteering, just something that I do”

Volunteering is seen as an incredibly weighty terms laden with different moral and cultural values (beyond the reach of many’s personal everyday experience). In other words, there is no clearly understood technical definition, that goes beyond the values we attach to volunteering and that make it what is.

I’ve noticed that when we seek to understand the benefits of volunteering, we often do so in two ways: either positioning volunteering as a means to an end, or as an end in itself.

I want to just look at these two approaches and try to understand how these approaches contrast and sometimes contradict each other. But also look at how these two approaches complement each other, so that we can make the strongest possible case for volunteering whoever we’re talking to: policy makers, funders, senior managers in our organisations, or even potential volunteers.

It was a post by DJ Cronin on i-volunteer.org.uk that got me thinking on this. His post gives a bit of context, i.e. raising awareness about the personal and social benefits of volunteering and the specific responsibility of those in volunteering development and management to get out of their “cocoon and educate”.

Volunteering as a means to an end

“Volunteer is a pay rate, not a job title” – @ChanceUK

John Ramsey’s recent post on the Association of Volunteer Managers website “The conflict between want and need” made the case that it makes more sense to view volunteering as a means to an end. He uses the specific example of managing volunteers for an organisation like Age Concern:

“Volunteering is part of our ethos. However, we are not ‘about’ volunteering, we are ‘about’ the health and well-being of older people. Volunteering does of course play a crucial role in the health and well-being of older volunteers but we do not exist to provide volunteering opportunities per se.”

So, from the standpoint of an organisation, charity or movement, volunteering’s value is in how involving volunteers enables it to meet its mission.

If you think about it, this is an incredibly rational way of coming at volunteering. Volunteers are essentially a kind of mechanism performing a particular function. As a result, it follows that volunteers should have a specific role (in the same way, an organisation employs paid staff to carry out a role that helps it deliver on its mission, not because it wants to particularly offer employment).

If this is how we explain the role of volunteers, the purpose of volunteering programmes is locked on achieving clear social impacts, the more measurable and demonstrable the better. Volunteering programmes are like carefully designed instruments, enabling the organisation or group to meet their aims and objectives.

This approach offers answers to those who question the value of volunteering, by looking at the overall effectiveness of organisations involving volunteers in meeting their global aims and objectives. For instance, it’s not about numbers of volunteers or even the personal benefits to the volunteers themselves, it’s more likely about numbers (such as key performance indicators in the jargon) like the service users who’ve been served and how successfully, etc.

This approach reminds us about the costs of effectively involving volunteers, and demands that the benefits to service users outweigh the costs to the organisation of involving volunteers. For many volunteers, the social impact of their volunteering is the key driver, beyond any benefits to them personally.

I think it’s helpful to compare this rational view of volunteering, with the conventional way of understanding fundraising. A charity raises funds to help it meet its mission, not because there is some kind of intrinsic value to fundraising above and beyond the money it raises.

The problem with this approach is that when volunteers are viewed as a means to an end, their special value is often underestimated. Volunteers true value to an organisation extends well beyond the services they help deliver. It can also place pressure to value those volunteers that deliver greater amounts, much before volunteers who may deliver much smaller amounts.

A second order problem is that very often funders are not satisfied with outcomes for volunteers in and of their volunteering, they are more interested in how volunteers will meet the needs of the service users and ultimate aims of the funding application.

Volunteering as an end in itself

Volunteers don’t get paid, not because they’re worthless, but because they’re priceless. – Sherry Anderson

In another sense, volunteering comes with some intrinsic benefits and value ‘right out of the box’- just as the above quote alludes to. Volunteering is in many ways an end in itself.

Volunteering inspires something more akin to a belief system in those who practise it. They believe in volunteering’s value a priori, not a posteriori. They don’t need to know the actual benefits and worth of volunteering before they do it. They don’t need all the social impact spelt out or measurable. Sure, social impact may be the intention, but it doesn’t need to be proven before a volunteer will get involved (here I’m really speaking as a volunteer myself).

Although having evidence of impact never hurts, not having it doesn’t necessarily deter volunteers from developing that kind of volunteering programme. The impact is believed, rather than known.

Viewing volunteering as an end in itself is certainly not tantamount to saying that the social impact of volunteering is irrelevant or inconsequential. It’s saying the reverse, it’s saying that a volunteering activity’s value is not dependent on its outcome.

Indeed, often the social impact of volunteering is impossible to understand out of the context of the relationships between those involved. In otherwise, often the single most important social impact a volunteer has are the supportive relationships they build with those they volunteer with (staff, service users and other volunteers). In this sense, volunteering can be an end in itself.

It’s worth considering the approach of Community Service Volunteers here:

Volunteering with CSV is a two way street. We aim to make sure our volunteers get as much out of the experience as the people and communities they help.

Arguably, CSV’s policy of rejecting no-one who applies to volunteer, stems from this belief in the intrinsic value of volunteering.

It’s ironic that while this approach of believing in the intrinsic value of volunteering may appear less rational, it’s in fact much more pragmatic. It also seems to be a more convincing explanation of what motivates volunteers, than simply because volunteer think of themselves as a means to end for the organisation.

Although we have ways of explaining how volunteering affects change, the indisputable proof can be illusive. Impact may take many years to manifest itself or transpire in all kinds of ways that are not immediately obvious, definitive or tangible. Volunteers are often far more motivated by a belief in the people they engage with, the merit of the particular cause or even a belief that the volunteering itself offers the volunteer themselves valuable experience.

As a result, the motivations for volunteering often hinge on a belief in the value of the volunteering itself. In many cases, in the absence of any clear evidence one way or the other, it comes down to the belief of the volunteer in the volunteering they’re taking part in.

The problem with this approach is that it becomes a more subjective experience which is then harder to communicate to a mass audience and general public. How do you educate people in the power of volunteering, if the best way to really understand it is to do it for yourself?

Often the strongest volunteering experiences, are highly personal. This approach also can also create challenges though in balancing the needs of volunteers with the needs of service users. It can, in a sense, create services where both service users and service providers (the volunteers) are beneficiaries. For example, this can sometimes make it harder for organisations to mobilize around their aims, whilst bringing their volunteers with them.

Joining the debate

It’s common in arguing publicly for the value of volunteering for us to present volunteering as both a means to end, as well as an end in itself. Justin Davis Smith argues this dual role in the recently published manifesto of Volunteering England. Volunteering is a means to offering services, but it’s also an end in itself offering benefits to the volunteers themselves:

Volunteering helps deliver essential public services, build social capital and develop trust between individuals and communities. It encourages integration and drives community cohesion. It’s informal and formal, cooperative and co-productive. It’s good for the individual too, improving health and well-being and providing opportunities to acquire skills and knowledge that can enhance career development or employment prospects.

I raise this debate because I think it heavily influences the way we explain volunteering to a broader public. It’s affects the way we seek to persuade the volunteering doubters and skeptics. For example, if we see volunteering as a means to an end – we tend to seek to persuade through evidence of impact. If we believe in volunteering as an end in itself, we focus on the intrinsic value of volunteering and how it fits in the concept of civil society.

Of course, in reality we take arguments from both sides when seeking to explain the value of volunteering. But I think it is interesting to consider these two approaches and routes to valuing volunteering.

Actually, it’s the fact that volunteering is as much an end in itself as it is a means to an end that makes it, and giving activities like it, special.

Further reading

Supported volunteering is a really interesting example of why it’s critical to have a balanced approach to volunteering- in the sense of seeing it as ‘a means to an end’ and ‘an end in itself’.

For example, to carry out supported volunteering requires us to think really carefully about the resources needed and the design of the programme/project to ensure the volunteering delivers a meaningful social impact in line with the organisation’s mission for its service users.

Added to this, supported volunteering also challenges us to defend volunteering as an end in itself against those who may say that supported volunteering projects are not efficient enough or are too complex to deliver their mission or achieve their aims.

For loads more interesting discussion on supported volunteering check out the presentation below:

Policy terms

Another interesting area where this discussion of means and ends of volunteering comes in is in the public policy discussion of volunteering. This is a massive subject- too big for this post – but here’s a quick example:

Government has been criticised for focussing too much on using volunteering numbers as a way of measuring the success of volunteering programmes. This approach tends to ignore the actual impact those volunteers have- in other words how successfully volunteers have been usefully integrated and are a means to an end, not merely signed up and processed. Many are frustrated with policy makers who seem to ignore the massive range of impacts and achievements of volunteering programmes, just because they defy simple quantitative analysis.

However, Government also gets caught up in approaching volunteering in a very mechanistic fashion as a tool for delivering a particular policy goal, e.g. reprimanding the youth in London who have to ‘volunteer’ to earn back their Oyster, immigrants taking up volunteering to earn their citizenship, or school pupils volunteering as part of their educational experience. This clumsy approach attempts to make volunteering the means to achieve an oversimplified end.

It seems to warp the possibility (the freedom) of volunteering being a good in its own terms- an end in itself- regardless of its success in achieving any one specific policy outcome. Is the real value of volunteering that it can enable young people to earn back free transport, immigrants earn British citizenship or pupils to meet the goals of the national curriculum? Surely volunteering’s value goes way beyond that narrow and unbalanced approach.

Different starting points

It is worth also pointing out that the two ways of looking at volunteering very often have two different starting points. ‘Means to an end’ thinking is usually quite ‘organisation centric’.

While ‘end in itself’ thinking is often quite ‘volunteer centric’ in its approach.

Prologue: I’m really interested in the lessons for voluntary organisations from the experience of the media industry facing the social media revolution square on. How can we build a positive agenda of organisational change that adapts best to this new networked reality?

I think that many in the voluntary sector (the formal part to some extent, but especially the informal part) have internalised much of how gift economies work in practice, because that’s where the sector’s roots lie. Jeff Jarvis’s What Would Google Do? and Chris Anderson’s Free are interesting because they mark a shift in the thinking in the private sector. The gift economy is going mainstream. A book like Andrew Keen’s ‘The Cult of the Amateur‘ demonstrate that the reaction against the growing significance of giving activities in the mainstream economy. Keen’s argument is not economic, it’s cultural. Volunteers and amateurs represent a threat to our culture.

Increasingly, as new market opportunities that social media opens up become better understood, they’re effectively coming to know what many in the voluntary sector have always understood. That is, that relationships based on giving have a value socially, spiritually, politically, culturally and economically.

Case study

The newspaper industry is one example of how social media has brought a professional sector closer to the gift economy and, as a consequence, is now encountering many issues that are all too familiar to those in volunteerism.

While newspapers were only printed, publication and distribution were costly. As a result, the means of production were in the hands of the few who could pay what it cost to run a mass circulation newspaper. With the advent of the internet, newspapers went online and many dipped their toe in the gift economy giving their content away on the web in the hope of somehow monetizing the increased reach. Others stuck resolutely with the exchange economy, following an online subscription model: money in exchange for access to content.

Now though, the gift economy is better understood by newspaper publishers. Social media means readers can comment directly on an article, rather than write a letter to the editor. They can share an article with friends, sending a link to their contacts via social networks. Readers can now even help contribute to the content of the online newspaper itself, sending in photos, editing collaborative articles or acting as an eyewitness from the scene itself as social media facilitates communicating in real time.

Social media operates so effectively because we like to give. We like to give our opinion. We want our ideas to gain currency and our thoughts to be validated. We like to give others the benefit of our network, passing information on. Above all, we like to give, to be useful and helpful to others. There are lots of reasons we give as we each have our own personal reasons for giving.

Co-Production and making money a metaphor for giving

The significance of social media for volunteerism is that it is providing the means to build on ideas that pre-date the technology itself. One such idea is that of co-production. It’s a term originally coined by Professor Elinor Ostrom, by later developed by Edgar Cahn. As with the idea of prosumers, it looks to produce results by bringing together service providers and service users.

Time Banks founded by Edgar Cahn are an interesting example of developing a system that promotes the exchange of giving. It’s a curious hybrid of the exchange and gift economies. Cahn used the metaphor of exchange, to explain the power of giving in familiar terms. In so doing, he was positioning volunteering at the core of society and off the fringes.

In a Time Bank community whatever you give is measured in time. ‘Time dollars’ are banked at a local Time Bank and can then be exchanged for something another member of the local Time Bank is prepared to give. Cahn developed Time Banks around the importance of the ‘core economy‘: home, family, neighbourhood and community. It’s important to recognise that a large part of the gift economy is often overlooked. When faced with supporting family and friends, it’s natural to give, rather than seek to exchange.

The interface between formal and informal volunteering

Interestingly this means that few would consider giving time to family as volunteering. In the UK, the government’s Citizenship Survey deliberately avoids tracking giving activity between relatives. NFPSynergy in March 2009 have argued persuasively (PDF) that the Home Office’s definitions on volunteering which are fairly loose, tend to over-estimate the levels of volunteering. It’s worth considering that a large part of the work done in the gift economy is therefore taken for granted such as: raising families, making communities safe and vibrant, caring for the disadvantaged, fighting injustice, making democracy work, etc.

Ultimately, one of biggest opportunities that social media offers volunteer managers is in thinking through new ways to involve volunteers more in how their volunteering experience is managed. Many volunteering programmes already have co-production baked into them: typically mentoring, befriending or programmes training volunteers from amongst their service users are all examples.

Can the giving activities that make up volunteering move online?

It’s worth quickly getting some historical context. When ‘surfing the net’ was a minority pursuit, many saw the online world as separate from the offline world. In 1999, the Netherlands became the first country where the majority of its citizens were online. Now, a decade on, it’s increasingly common for people to experience a merging of the activities they do online and offline.

This merging of experience has meant that the way we use the web has matured. We no longer use it for the novelty value or for the sake of it, we use it because it adds something to our lives. It augments, rather than shadows, real world giving activities. In the late 1990s when newspapers first went online, they were often an attempt to transfer the printed newspaper experience to the computer screen. It was a failure. They were a pale shadow of the printed newspaper in most cases.

To be used, newspapers on the web had to give us something we didn’t get from newspapers in print. Making newspapers social media friendly has been a big element in how newspapers online have evolved to give readers an experience that augmented their real world experience. The jury’s out on where we’ll be getting our news from in the next 50 years.

Moving to the web is a paradigm shift towards embracing the social web and ways of the gift economy. As Don Tapscott, author of Wikinomics notes:

«Why didn’t NBC invent YouTube? Why didn’t AT&T launch Twitter? Yellow Pages should have built Facebook and Microsoft should have come up with Google. And Craigslist would have been a perfect venture for the New York Times.»

In each case, the new kid on the block took advantage of social media and moved to a giving model. But why has volunteerism found it so hard to harness social media when as a giving activity it’s already halfway there?

Hard as is for newspapers to move online, it’s a relatively simple proposition. News is after all based on the exchange of information and the web is a communication and information platform. Volunteering is, though, a very different proposition and in a way it’s no surprise moving online has been difficult. When you look at volunteering websites, many have simply transferred the volunteer brokerage service online, narrowing in on recruitment and volunteering opportunity search (e.g. Do-it, Volunteer Match, etc), the part of the volunteering experience that requires an exchange of information.

Information is importantly a nonrival good which may be consumed by one consumer without preventing simultaneous consumption by others. This makes information giving simpler and easier than other kinds of giving for rival goods.

It’s much harder to move over aspects of volunteering, such as learning from service users, sensing the difference your volunteering has made, supporting the most vulnerable and disadvantaged, etc. Faced with these kind of challenges, the web is not always the optimum platform and it starts to become more evident why those in volunteerism are unsure about how to harness social media.

How moving journalism online has brought it closer to other giving activities

The experience of many in the newspaper industry as they’ve moved online has demonstrated that when they use social media, giving is more effective than exchanging. A willingness to share and be open (as when giving to each other) is a more effective strategy than limiting supply and being closed (as when formally exchanging with each other). Jeff Jarvis believes that these giving relationships online amount to what he terms as a ‘link economy‘.

“Links can be exploited and monetized; get links and you can grab audience and show ads and make money. Content is becoming a cost burden, what you have to have to get the links, but in and of itself, content can’t draw value without an audience, without links.”

How do online newspapers get these links? They are given them by their audience, amongst them participants, enthusiasts and volunteer bloggers, by opening up their content and inviting people in. They can’t oblige consumers of their product to link. Instead they can make it easier and more worthwhile to link. It’s the gift economy in action.

Journalism is a profession that is going through the social media revolution. As the internet has provided a low cost content publishing and distribution system, writers willing to share their passion are stepping in to fill gaps that professional journalists are not filling, e.g. niche subjects, hyperlocal coverage, etc. As the internet is enabling networked communication in real time through sites like Twitter and Facebook, so witnesses to breaking news with a mobile handy are replacing the journalist reporting from the scene of the action.

Citizen journalism is where “members of the public play an active role in the process of collecting, reporting, analyzing and disseminating news and information”. We Media sums it up as:

“Armed with easy-to-use web publishing tools, always-on connections and increasingly powerful mobile devices, the online audience has the means to become an active participant in the creation and dissemination of news and information”

It’s a complicated picture. Citizen journalism grows out of the idea of civic journalism where readers are not treated as spectators, but as participants. It’s a participatory approach to journalism, where professional journalists are increasingly collaborating with amateur journalists to produce their work. It’s worth looking at different journalists working in this area such as Nick Booth, Help me investigate with Paul Bradshaw and those on Talk About Local.

This is taking journalism into the gift economy where it’s no longer a simple exchange between producers and consumers, writers and their readership. This new form of journalism is confronting issues familiar to many in volunteerism who’ve worked for many years in the gift economy.

• How, as a professional journalist benefiting from information gifted by citizen journalists, should you recognise or reward their contribution?
• How can professionals and amateurs work alongside each other?
• How can journalists, that straddle the exchange and gift economies, fund their activity without changing the nature of the relationship they have with those who give to them?

Further reading

Jon Snow Interviews Professor Edgar Cahn. In this short clip Edgar explains the simple concept of Time Banking – Volunteering for the 21st Century which is sweeping across the UK.

Co-production – A Manifesto for Growing the Core Economy – New Economics Foundation (2008)

We’ve all seen the headlines: many exaggerate and distort how we can use the web.

Imagine for a sec that we learnt how to fly thanks to some amazing piece of technology. How would the newspapers cover the story? How would the media cover the emergence as the uptake grew of wholly new piece of technology?

Substitute the word ˜flying’ where the papers talk about the web and you get the picture. Not much would probably change. This emphasises the point that much of issues are to do with the fact that the web is new. The behaviours associated with the technology and how the new possibilities influence our social relationships transpire later. The serious point here is that we are living through a period of profound social change, not just technological change. We’re all looking for answers. To find those answers we need to introduce a modicum of balance into the debate.

Take the example of technology that has become mundane. Learning to ride a bike was terrifying when we fell off for the first time, terrific when we were let to go solo. It was amazing when we learnt to play games and be with our peers, shocking if you consider cycling accident statistics! Revolutionary when we realised the significance of being able to go off our own away from our parents, and mystifying when tried to mend our first puncture.

Balance comes inevitably from experience, we need to give it time. However, web technology moves so fast we need to get this balanced perspective by carefully considering the issues.

Is there too much information?

Before looking at the web’s potential for changing how we can build new information and support services, it’s worth asking the fundamental question: is access to more and more information always a good thing?

We’re living through a Googlefication of our culture. There’s a belief that the web’s mission is to make more information readily accessible. Google’s seventh point in it’s explicitly stated philosophy is: “There’s always more information out there.” The right approach for a technology company, but is this the right approach if we’re concerned with the human value of information? Information can be empowering, but it can also be overwhelming and even anxiety provoking. Perhaps the real challenge is not technological. Information is a human issue, not a technical problem after all.

Mark Charmer made the analogy between Twitter and the invention of radar during the first half of the Twentieth century at the Media140 conference. Social media, like Twitter, is a new more powerful way of making the previously invisible life around us, visible. Just as radar did in its day. In fact, it’s an analogy that works for social media in general and the web. Radar’s battle is with ˜clutter’ things like rain and sandstorm that sometimes get picked up. Some of this peripheral vision information captured in social media can be useful, but plenty can lead to false alarms and worry.

Let’s look at three new capabilities that the web’s given. Although there are many others.

Anonymity

Anonymity is not new – writing – helplines – fax – but the web has opened up new opportunities for practitioners to make particularly early interventions that were either not practical before or did not offer a very complete form of anonymity.

When we look at the issue of how we ensure the security of the identity of users crucial for the effectiveness of information and support services, it’s striking how much of a shift is taking place. The rise of anonymity is significant because it empowers the service user. Unlike with confidentiality, anonymity is within the service user’s sphere of influence. It’s also subject to very personal drivers like feelings (such as embarrassment), rather than formal drivers such as the laws and organisational policies, as with confidentiality.

Ruthie Henshall, the singer and actress, said recently, “We’re constantly judging our insides on everyone else’s outsides”. She was describing how she coped with her own mental health difficulties. As a celebrity, the difference between how she felt on the inside and how people perceived her on the inside was perhaps even more pronounced. Anonymity gives you the opportunity to share what they are feeling on the inside, with others on the outside (it needs to be a safe environment to be able to facilitate this).

The strengths of friends as advisors are that they are emotionally supportive, acknowledge feelings and are non-judgmental and trusted. All things that it is difficult to feel about a trained advisor who you may typically only approach at moments of crisis. Trained advisors and professionals strength is in how they understand the options, provides accurate information and offer an external perspective on your situation.

Friends are crucial for relationships issues- when mental health problems involve relationships- users are less likely to reach out to mental health service providers. Health concerns are less likely to be discussed with friends, kept private and not shared.

Choice

Is there too much choice or can personalisation overcome the overwhelming threat of too much information? Young people are used today to using a whole range of online tools. It’s important to understand how these differ and compare if we want to offer a range of options to service users. Up to now, online information and support has previously often be about developing ‘oceans’ that can be accessed wherever and whenever the service user needs them. These vast oceans of information and support exist online where space is no longer a storage issue and communication can be asynchronous.

At the same time, and increasing as technology improves, the web provides information as a stream. It’s allowing much more synchronous information and support services to take place such as voice-based technologies, web cam and chat as user uptake grows and they become more cost effective. The web is also allowing more broadcasting or live streaming of events or conferences that can provides information and support.

Given the choice that now exists both for service users and providers, the challenge is to offer a balance of services or to understand better what you specialise in so that you can build partnerships with organisations that complement your work/services.

“Online is good if you want to remain anonymous and don’t feel comfortable talking to someone face to face, or if there is no services to help you in your area.” – Participant, Self Harm project talking about the discussion boards on TheSite.org.

Participation

Finally, participation is a significant new capability offered by the web because of how it is shifting the relationship between service users and providers.

“Young people are creators not consumers of the services.” – Sally Carr, Leader in Charge, Lesbian & Gay Youth Manchester

“It’s great as it allows you to get advice from people that have been through the same thing and makes you feel good when you can relate and give advice to others.” – Participant, Self Harm project talking about the discussion boards on TheSite.org.

Services are no longer just about the delivery, they are also now about enabling users to feedback and be part of the continual improvement of the services themselves.

Three examples demonstrates three different ways in which participation can work. This models can broadly be distinguished by what the aims of the participation are. Namely:

Improving public services

Patient Opinion is a great example of this work to rethink the way the knowledge and experience of service users can help transform public services if it is understood and recognised by service providers.

Mapping of all services, both public and community

The Aliss Project is a great example of this drive to use the web to better map what services are available both in the public sector and the voluntary sector, so that sufferers of long term conditions can more easily access services available.

Developing communities for social change

Mind Apples is a great example of how the web can bring together communities of individual inspired by a call to action. In this case, helping to reframe mental health as the pursuit of health, rather than the overcoming of illness. In this campaign, Mind Apples calls on people to share what five things can contribute to a healthy mind.

Challenges

• How can we use new technology to offer early intervention?
• How can we use new technology to widen access to our services?
• How can we use new technology to change the relationship between service users and service providers?

I’ve summarised my thoughts so far on thinking about how the concept of the gift economy can help us understand giving activities, such as volunteering and participation, in the context of the social web. I’ve done this ahead of the Volunteering Counts Conference March 1st-2nd in Manchester organised by the Institute of Volunteering Research where I’ll be presenting.

Abstract

The rise of social media and digital networks is contributing to the return to prominence of the gift economy. As the web has enabled social networks and online communities to grow, so values such as sharing, openness and collaboration associated with the gift economy, are increasingly influencing the relationships and connections between us. From business strategies through to public policy, giving relationships are seen as offering credible and valuable contributions.

This revolution in values offers volunteerism and other forms of giving such as participation, civic engagement and professional-amateurism, an opportunity to play an even greater role in a ever more networked Britain.

This article attempts to unpick the increasing number of connections between these different modes of giving, rendered both possible and visible by a more networked Britain and world beyond. Focusing our attention on how these different giving activities are interconnected, rather than separated, opens up a new way of understanding participation, professional-amateurism, civic engagement and volunteering. The connecting thread between these activities played out on the social web, are the twin components of positive personal freedom and beneficial social impact.

Understanding giving activities in terms of the intention behind the giving and extent to which they are driven by personal freedom and social impact, provides the basis for a new framework to understand how the web is changing the way we give today.

Two patterns of how these different giving activities are connected should be noted:

First, social media has meant giving activities can take place on a much bigger scale than before the digital revolution. There are a growing number of examples that point to how different modes of giving can scale. Added to this is the new visibility of giving activities increasingly mediated by the web, as more users take up social media. As givers share what they are doing with others, so it becomes increasingly possible to assess the range of giving activities taking place. This new sense of range and scale is what offers us a new opportunity to establish a framework that makes sense of how we give today.

Second, as giving activities are reconfigured across brand new networks of people and groups, the role of the state, institutions, corporations and organisations in promoting, sponsoring and facilitating giving activities is changing. Whether givers are participating, volunteering, engaging or Pro-Am’ing the increased scale and visibility of giving opportunities means more and more are taking place out of the direct control of the state, institutions, corporations and organisations, bodies that shaped the giving activities of the last century.

Full article

Is Web Changing Way We Give – Patrick Daniels