RichardTaylor
commented
2 years ago I strongly agree with this.
I think the decision to remove volunteers from team@mysociety.org (and other points of contact with the organisation) was a strategic mistake.
The important thing is the strategy has now changed.
This question of team@mysociety.org membership has been discussed on WhatDoTheyKnow catch-up calls and it was noted there that the usage of team@mysociety has evolved and reduced. The equivalent of reinstatement to team@ might now be internal blog access and access to more Slack channels.
Volunteers of six-month's standing have already been given access to (or have had access restored to) the internal blog (I got my access back in November 2021).
doesn't embed the notion that volunteers are part of the team into our mental model of what "the organisation" is.
If the team is defined as the paid staff team then by one definition it isn't very diverse, everyone in the group is a paid staff member of a charity. Volunteers have a wide range of situations and backgrounds. Volunteers are also often users of the charity's services.
It's worth noting that WhatDoTheyKnow volunteers have been able to read team@mysociety.org for many years via Google groups, so when volunteers are omitted from a recipient list, eg. of an email announcing the date of a retreat, we can still see it.
Related is the question of who should appear at:
sagepe
mySociety has active support from volunteers and external collaborators, and is aiming to be increasingly collaborative and porous over the next 10 years.
My proposal here is that
team@mysociety.orgshould encompass more than just the current staff team.A recent "all team" email was sent out with the recipients, but this misses out our valued WDTK volunteers:
This is a trivial example, and could easily be rectified by a reminder to the sender, but the issue is that the current setup makes it too easy to make this mistake and doesn't embed the notion that volunteers are part of the team into our mental model of what "the organisation" is.
The main problem, IMO, is that
team@includes only staff.I think we should:
staff@mysociety.orgvolunteers@mysociety.org(which includesvolunteers@whatdotheyknow.comand other programmes' volunteering addresses)team@mysociety.orgto includestaff@,volunteers@,trustees@,directors@This way it would be easier for a sender to decide whether a mail should be "staff only" or "all team", but would still enable a composition of different groups (e.g.
staff@+volunteers@,staff@+trustees@, etc).