Emotional burnout of volunteers

Earlier, I emphasized the value of voluntary work as being more accurate, honest, and creative compared to paid work. However, an important reservation must be made here. Some tools of Social Architecture are fraught with danger. 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 characteristic of the tribal corporate culture of the organization at that time. Many key players were exhausted and emotionally exhausted. Not by hearsay a condition familiar to me.

Burnout studies you can read about on 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 such a characteristic feature of burnout in voluntary communities:

• It is expressed as a deep aversion to a specific project. We throw the project away, stop responding to email. mail and we can even leave the community. The rest note: "hmm, he is acting somehow strange ... probably upset or tired."
• This condition is project-oriented. Those. we burn out in relation to some projects, but with others everything can be normal. In other cases, it can paralyze us even for several months - then we will start working again, but already abandoning the project and taking on something else.
• This happens once every one to three years, depending on your nature and situation. Very persistent, motivated individuals can endure longer, but when they break, it will be even worse.
• There is a treatment. This is the most intransigent approach I tried when I managed to find money and pay burnt out volunteers for what they did for free. They returned happy and continued to do their own thing.
• The disease can also be prevented. Paid workers do not suffer from exhaustion either. Of course, they can become depressed, but usually they are not cut down suddenly.

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

People invest a lot in their professions, they take great risks, especially in their youth, hoping for a reward later. For a long time, we may not attach importance to material rewards if we are confident that we are following the right path. For example, a young writer or musician is ready to endure poverty for many years if he believes that fame and fortune await him ahead.

And it doesn’t matter how much the dying carrot hangs in front of us from a stick - it always looms in our subconscious. We are essentially economic animals. All life is bookkeeping. We perfectly know how to lie to ourselves, but nevertheless, behind every action and decision is an economic motive. We invest in projects because we feel that they will contribute to our success, even if it takes years. We compete with others, trying to find niches where our talents will shine in all its glory.

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

This burnout is like a reckoning. We throw the project as if it suddenly became poisonous, as if we realized that they had swallowed some rotten piece. Here are some ways to reduce the likelihood of such a development:

• We cannot work on projects alone. Concentrating all responsibility on one person who does not work beyond measure often leads to burnout.
• Projects require a business plan. The hope of receiving material reward allows the brain to put up with a lack of reward for some time.
• Preventive measures against burnout may be information. When we explain to people what burnout is, they quickly recognize it and ask for help even before it goes 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”:

• Foreword The wisdom of the crowd
• 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

---

about the author

“Unfortunately, we do not choose death for ourselves, but we can meet it with dignity to be remembered as men.”
- film “Gladiator”



Peter Hinchens (Pieter Hintjens) - Belgian developer, writer. He served as CEO and chief software designer at iMatix , a company that produces free software , such as the ZeroMQ library (the library takes care of data buffering, queuing, establishing and recovering connections, etc.), OpenAMQ, Libero , GSL code generator , and the Xitami web service .

• The 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 Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure (FFII) association , which fought patent law.
• CEO of Wikidot's own wiki project .
• He was an activist of open standards and the founder of the Digital Standards Organization .
• Peter in 2007 was named one of the 50 most influential people in the field of "Intellectual Property".

Read more here: For thirty-five years, as a necromancer, I breathed life into dead iron using a code

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

... I want to write one last model, the last protocol, which is dedicated to how to pass away, having some knowledge and time left. This time I will not format the RFC. :) The
protocol of death

Peter Hinchens Website
Wikipedia article

about the project

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

Thoughts and ideas of Peter Hinchens on Habré:

• Life Protocol
• Optimistic Merging: People first, then code. Build the right community and it will write the code you need
• Social architecture: strategies for the 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 in mind projects / startups with a high share of technologies aimed at the public good in the first place and at making profit as an auxiliary function (for example, like Wikipedia), write in a personal message or register for the accelerator program .

If you send links to articles, videos, courses at Coursera on managing / building / improving product- oriented communities, I have a chocolate bar.