General Issues Store Folken Need to Work On

Getting More Volunteers

Here's a list of stuff preventing us from getting more, regular volunteers:

• There can be at times very little staff time left over after selling, sorting, and putting out fires to coordinate volunteers.
• There are a large number of (individually) simple pieces of information required to be very effective.
• There is very little work where it is visually obvious what to do
• Its easy to make mistakes that require non-trivial amounts of work to fix (often by staff members) [cost of failure is relatively high]
• Store isn't exactly a sexy place to work and dealing with the general public brings an entire suite of demotivators to the plate
• Its often loud
• There are few things currently available for volunteers with physical disabilities to do
• Store volunteers might volunteer only to intercept items they want
• The current store staff is mostly men, potentially a social barrier to getting female volunteers
• Our existing documentation for training volunteers changes every time we get a new person! Do we really need to re-invent the wheel every time?

Proposed solutions

• Get more labor into advanced testing first, make more money on component sales, buy more dedicated store labor
• Divide and conquer the sea of rote information. Have 3 divisions of store volunteers: 1) adopter (simple, visual) 2) post build (more advanced, perhaps in conjuction with Tech Support Volunteerism)
• Interns (project based).
• Part of getting adopters involved. Requires just a ton of visual aids, reorganization of stuff to make putting stuff away easier, and perhaps, partial management by interns
• Continue to improve store atmosphere. Develop a rewards system for good volunteering. Keep people-adverse volunteers away from interacting with public by having work for them to do that does not involve interaction with others.
• Develop a fourth division of labor for volunteers with physical disabilites. Have a space available for them to be productive.
• Actively recruit women into the store for volunteering
• Improve documentation within an agreed-upon framework, perhaps through the division of labor mentioned above (really you would just need adopter-specific tools and post-build specific tools).

Dependencies

• More money and the priority for it to be spent on us
• Much planning, experimentation, and tweaking
• Visual aids, simple flow charts, and simple documentation
• Sound dampening materials and design