Emotional burnout volunteers

Earlier, I emphasized the value of voluntary work as more accurate, honest and creative in comparison with paid work. However, an important reservation must be made here. Some tools of Social Architecture are dangerous. By setting an exciting goal for people, you can push them towards self-destruction. This was the main problem in FFII (Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure), when I came there, and it was aggravated by the high intensity of emotions that was characteristic of the organization’s tribal corporate culture at that time. Many of the key players were exhausted and emotionally exhausted. Not by hearsay familiar to me the state itself.

Studies of emotional burnout, which you can read about in Wikipedia , in my opinion, do not correspond to what is happening in real life. But reality is still more important than theory. I have repeatedly observed this characteristic feature of burnout in voluntary communities:

• It is expressed as a deep aversion to a particular project. We throw the project away, stop responding to email. mail and we can even leave the community. The rest say: “hm, he behaves in a strange way ... probably upset or tired.”
• This state is projective. Those. we fade in relation to one project, but with others everything can be fine. In other cases, we can be paralyzed even for several months - then we will start working again, but already abandoning the project and taking on something else.
• This happens every one to three years, depending on your nature and situation. Very persistent, motivated individuals can endure longer, but when they fail, it will be even worse.
• There is a cure. I tried this strangest approach when I managed to find the money and pay the burned out volunteers for what they did for free. They returned happy and continued to do their work.
• The disease can also be prevented. Paid workers also do not suffer from exhaustion. Of course, they may fall into depression, but usually they are not cut down suddenly.

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Which leads me to the idea that the problem here is the problem of optimal investment of professional efforts.

People invest a lot in their professions, take great risks, especially in their youth, hoping for a reward later. We can ignore material rewards for a long time if we are sure that we are following the right path. For example, a young writer or musician is willing to endure poverty for many years if he believes that fame and wealth are waiting for him ahead.

And no matter how faded a carrot hangs in front of us from a stick - it always looms in our subconscious. We are essentially economic animals. All life - accounting. We are perfectly able to lie to ourselves, but still there is an economic motive behind every action and decision. We invest in projects because we feel that they will contribute to our success, even if it takes years. We are competing with others, trying to find a niche where our talents will shine in all its glory.

And so it turns out that a young brain, struggling to invest its resources in the right things, finds himself in a situation where a snowball of lies reaches a critical mass. The road suddenly ends in a dead end. The people who followed her are deceivers and manipulators. Mission - fake. The endorsements of others are emotional manipulation. Years of effort go up in dust, and every next minute becomes a meaningless sacrifice.

Such a burnout is like a reckoning. We are throwing the project as if it had suddenly become poisonous, as if we understood that we had swallowed up some rotten piece. Here are some ways to reduce the likelihood of such a development:

• We cannot work on projects alone. Concentration of all responsibility on one person who does not work excessively often leads to burnout.
• Projects require a business plan. Hope to receive material rewards allows the brain to tolerate some time with the lack of rewards.
• Information can serve as a preventive measure against burning out. When we explain people what a burnout is, they recognize it faster and ask for help even before things go too far.
• Good tools and practices allow us to work with less stress and less dependence on one person.

Translation of the book "Social Architecture":

• Preface. Crowd wisdom
• Chapter 1. Toolkit
• Chapter 2
  - Emotional burnout of volunteers
  - How to capture / protect an open-source project
  - The myth of individual intelligence
• Chapter 6. Living Systems

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about the author

“Unfortunately, we do not choose death for ourselves, but we can meet her with dignity so that we will be remembered as men.”
- the movie "Gladiator"



Pieter Hintjens - Belgian developer, writer. He held the position of CEO and chief software designer at iMatix , a company that produces free software , such as the ZeroMQ library (the library takes care of some of the data buffering, queuing, connection establishment and recovery, etc.), OpenAMQ, Libero , GSL code generator , and the Xitami web service.

• Author of more than 30 protocols and distributed systems.
• Founder of the Edgenet project to create a completely secure, anonymous global P2P network.
• President of the Association for a Free Information Infrastructure (FFII) , which fought with patent law.
• CEO of the Wikidot Wiki Project.
• He was an open standards activist and founder of the Digital Standards Organization .
• In 2007, Peter was named one of the 50 most influential people in the field of “Intellectual Property”.

Much detail here: Thirty five years I, as a necromancer, inhaled life in dead iron with the help code

It's time for my last article. I could write more, there is time, but then I will think about other things: how comfortable it is to sit in bed, when to take painkillers, and about people around me.

... I want to write one last model, the last protocol, which is dedicated to how to die, having some knowledge and time in store. This time I will not format the RFC. :)
Death report

Peter Hinchens website
Wikipedia article

about the project

I, with the support of Filtech-accelerator , plan to publish on Habré (and, perhaps, in paper) the translation of the book “Social Architecture” . IMHO, this is the best (if not the only adequate) manual for managing / building / improving communities focused on product creation (and not on mutual grooming or “worship” to the leader, sports club, etc.).

Thoughts and ideas of Peter Hinchens on Habré:

• Death report
• Optimistic Merging: First people, then code. Build the right community and it will write the correct code
• Social architecture: stratagem for success of open source projects
• How to capture / protect an open-source project
• How to build a community. Translation of the book "Social Architecture": Chapter 1. Toolkit

Call to action

If you have projects / start-ups with a high share of technologies aimed at public benefit in the first place and to receive profit as an auxiliary function (for example, like Wikipedia), write in person or register for an accelerator program .

If you send links to articles, videos, courses on the Coursera on managing / building / improving communities, focused on creating a product , with me chocolate.