Identifying Socio-Technical Means to Support Small Loosely Coupled Groups of Volunteers

Volunteers provide a large variety of valuable services to society spanning from local community efforts to global non-profit organizations and online communities. While larger volunteer groups and online communities in particular have been studied extensively, there is a lack of research on small loosely coupled volunteer groups especially with respect to the way they collaborate to organize activities. Our work attempts to shed light onto such groups. In this paper, we present results from an exploratory study of five student organizations. Based on a literature analysis we developed an interview protocol and corresponding coding scheme that allowed us to analyse how such groups cooperate and how they use technology to communicate and organize activities. Our findings indicate areas of improvement around higher levels of transparency, well defined procedures, effective knowledge management and exchange between similar groups. We discuss these potentials and propose an initial socio-technical conceptualization to overcome current issues and support collaboration in such groups.