The bee volunteering

Challenge:

The challenge was related work for non profit organization or community volunteering. The task is to  organize 50+ volunteers, how they communicate best and to develop a model for that communication.  The communication is needed as they typically have assigned tasks once per month but ad hoc jobs can  be required and people need to be asked with short response time needed. Traditional communication  (email, classical phone calls) seem to be outdated, as many of people look more often to new messenger  ("generation whats app") but as well to other messenger("Signal" "iMessage") or classical  communication. Consequently there a breaks in communication and no common pattern does exist. As  there is a lack of volunteers, everybody is needed and the entry hurdle (way of communication) needs to  be low and flexible.

Selection:

Visualization was chosen. There is no common background of involved people (gender, age, profession),  visualization seems to be obvious choice as the problem could made be transparent, no entry hurdle to  add something (everybody can paint), it could be shown and shared and everybody could easily  contribute. The contribution could be via: adding something(picture, emoji style, hand drawing etc)   how people can communicate.

Application:

At one of the gatherings, a drawing was developed: everybody added via sticky note or direct paining on  a flipchart, how they communicate typically. That could be then put in order. After looking at the  outcome, a solution was developed, based on visual reflection. That happened in a second meeting  because of challenge.

A challenge in applying it: Not the whole community was there at first meeting (actually low number), so  people were approached individually and were asked to send a "virtual sticky note /piece of paper to  organizer. That was then put on the original flowchart. Picture was made and redistributed via most  common channel "email".

Insight:

It resulted in fun aspects (people liked to put their way of communication on the flipchart,  communication at event was taking place). But it was harmful to convince people not attending send  their contribution to the organizer. It was not so obvious for them, what that is for and looked to some

more conservative people "childish" (which was not a concern in the room). On the other hand that  obstacle might be similar with the other tools.

Approach:

To reach out to other people(which couldn`t attend the onsite meetings) an easy website (or any form  of collaboration tool accessible via Web) could be created, to reach out to people more easily and get  their feedback. That could even overcome the obstacle to paint something remotely  individually, with  some given tools/emoji style format, they only have to choose and to add. That might not even need a  first meeting and just results can be shown at real gathering and faster solution can be developed.

