Cat Herding:

The Art of

Volunteer Management

About Me

• Hi everyone! I’m Rachel Fish from Colorado
• I’ve been going to regionals since 2008, my first burn was Playa Del Fuego
• I am a software developer who is passionate about open source
• Been using Linux since I was 13
• Been volunteering for Apogaea since 2014

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About Playasoft

• Playasoft is the name of the software development team that built the Apogaea volunteer database and art grant system
• We’re a team of people mostly from the Colorado area but also including contributors from other burns as well as some of my friends
• In 2015 we built the art grant system for Apogaea which allows the Apogaea Creative Art Team Support (CATS) to accept applications for art grants from the community and judge them based on specific criteria
• In 2016 we built the volunteer database for Apogaea which allows all Apogaea departments to keep track of their volunteers before the event and generate printable reports for use during the event
• Check out our code on github! http://playa.software

Why develop custom software?

• In 2016 Apogaea was considering moving away from their old custom made volunteer database because it was slow and hard to use
• They were considering a range of commercial options, including Shiftboard which costs thousands of dollars per year
• Most commercial options are designed for businesses and charge per user, but burns are entirely volunteer driven and each participant who wants to volunteer would end up needing to be paid for
• Giving all your personal information to some for-profit corporation is not RADICAL SELF RELIANCE!

Who is using this?

• Colorado Burning Man Events
• Apogaea - Since 2017
• Denver DeCOmP - Since 2017
• Burnal Equinox - Since 2018
• Temple of Tranquility - Since 2023
• Elsewhence - Since 2017
• SunBurn - Since 2019
• PortalBurn - Since 2019
• But they switched to SignUpGenius after the pandemic? 😢

What needs do these events have?

• Getting volunteers involved year-round
• Pre-event
• Making sure departments have a sufficient number of volunteers signed up and trained
• Verifying medical volunteers have valid BLS / CPR certificates
• During event
• Keeping track of who is supposed to show up
• Post-event
• Keeping track of who actually showed up
• Generating reports that can be used for ticketing (volunteers get guaranteed tickets, etc)

Demo

• User flow
• Registering for an account
• Uploading certification documents
• Signing up for shifts
• Admin flow
• Creating new events
• Setting up departments and shifts
• Adding shifts to the schedule
• Assigning users to shifts
• Password protected shifts
• Shifts without a time
• Running reports

Shortcomings

• Hosting is decentralized, which is a blessing and a curse
• Since anyone can host their own copy of our software, when we develop new features everyone has to upgrade their instance separately
• Not designed for multiple events on a single instance
• The VolDB was originally developed with the assumption that there would only ever be one event happening at a time. This year DeCOmP and the Temple of Tranquility were scheduled for the same dates, which meant users signing up for DeCOmP were automatically being sent to the wrong event (fixed by having event-specific login links)
• Events need technical knowledge to set up the project
• If you know PHP and linux server admin, great! Otherwise you need to ask Rachel for help

Room to Grow

• Mobile app with offline support?
• What other tools do other events use?
• Burning Flipside has their own voldb
• I think Burning Man uses Shiftboard?
• I’ve seen a few other events use things like Google Forms
• What other tools could be used to facilitate event management?
• Keeping track of vendors?
• Training for department leads?
• Organizational / tribal knowledge?

Thank you!!