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Welcome to the vdash wiki!
- [Functional Requirements](wiki/Functional Requirements)
- [Use Cases](wiki/Use Cases)
- [Project Timeline](wiki/Project Timeline)
We are designing, building, and evaluating a system to facilitate volunteer integration with Rootstrikers.
Vdash (volunteer dashboard) will become an open source platform wherein specialized classes of users can create and post tasks for volunteers to complete.
Vdash will begin with a single job type -- crowdsourcing (crowd staffing) Rootstrikers social media accounts.
- Improve our social media outreach by harnessing the wisdom of the crowd;
- Engage our supporters in an ongoing conversation that will help build community among Rootstrikers;
- Be the first non-profit to organize hundreds or thousands of volunteers behind a single public identity;
- Develop and maintain the platform as open source code that other organizations can deploy and contribute to; and
- Activate an unprecedented coordinated, digital effort to stop corruption, which expands on the model that started Rootstrikers: the storytelling hashtag.
Rootstrikers, like many nonprofits, is perpetually reliant on the contributions of volunteers. We view this as a strength rather than a weakness. Volunteers have diverse skills and are able to make variable time commitments. It's important that we harness the strengths of everyone who's willing to contribute whether they are involved for seconds, hours, or months. Likewise, there are times when we need to recruit volunteers to work on focused, specific tasks that assist the community.
As such, we're building out a microtask-centric volunteer dashboard. The basic idea is that volunteers will be able to visit the dashboard and find tasks that they can help with immediately. Because volunteers vary in terms of skill and ability, we need to design the dashboard with care to ensure that the results are of the highest quality. This means following a couple of best practices from other microtask environments: namely, some tasks will be reviewing the work of other volunteers, and putting volunteers in productive tension with one another. An example of productive tension would be asking one volunteer to try to debunk another's claim. If they are unable to do so convincingly, we increase our confidence that the claim will stand up to scrutiny.
There are many types of tasks we envision implementing in the dashboard, from calling legislators to designing print media, to mobilizing other volunteers in our network. As a starting point, we've chosen to build out the necessary tools for a crowd of volunteers to help staff our social media presence. The staff at Rootstrikers spends time each day reading news and social media in order to write tweets and facebook posts that we hope will spread our message. We're certain that our network of tens of thousands of volunteers is reading even more of this news than our staff and has insights to share.
Although there are many tasks that we have in mind which we could add to the dashboard, we're starting small to see how it goes. Let's bear in mind the bigger vision while we build out the infrastructure necessary to solve the initial implementation. On the other hand, it's important to strike a balance that let's us get this task out the door so we can learn how our volunteers respond before over committing to any one design or strategy.