What gets adopted is what everyone knows and what helps today

Local groups introduce tools that nobody then uses. The reason is rarely the technology. A new system never competes with nothing. It competes with the places where the work already happens: those help immediately, while the system asks for upkeep first.

Two teams, the same checklist

A regional group is planning an information evening. Two volunteers write a checklist: room, equipment, registration, welcome, who takes the minutes, what still needs doing afterwards. Two evenings of work.

The checklist already exists. A team two regions away produced it six months ago, in more detail. Nobody is holding it back. It is attached to an email sent to nine people, sitting in the private cloud folder of the coordinator at the time, and in a third version on the laptop of someone who has since left.

To find it, you would have to know that it exists, who wrote it and what the file is called. After two handovers in the team, nobody knows that. Nothing is lost because someone is guarding it, but because nobody knows there is anything to find.

Three goals that apply at the same time

A volunteer-run group pursues three goals at once, and none of them is merely a means to another.

Capacity to act. The group needs to know quickly who is taking something on, where an activity is happening, how to respond to an event. That requires no office handing out tasks: an entirely autonomous group still has to be able to act, and to act this week.

Productivity. After a change on the committee, or when a new group starts, nobody should begin from zero. What is needed again and again — templates, procedures, decisions, contacts, experience — has to be findable, understandable and reusable.

Community. People rarely stay for the tasks. They stay for the people: being allowed to ask, encouragement, humour, the exchange with someone in another region who has had the same problem. That is not a by-product, it is a purpose in its own right.

From this follows the distinction that matters. A chat group is often excellent for capacity to act and for community, and weak for reuse. A shared repository carries productivity but creates no relationships. Neither replaces the other.

The wrong comparison

The question in the coordination team is almost always: which tool do we take? What gets compared are feature lists and prices, as if the new system stood against empty space.

It stands against the chat group, against email, against folders on private devices. Those places already have everyone in them and need no explaining to anyone. Every contribution helps at once: the question is answered, the date is fixed, the photo is shared — and a relationship is maintained along the way.

A shared repository demands the opposite: sign up, understand the structure, name things, file them. The benefit arrives later, and often for someone else.

That money and reach do not settle this comparison is shown by a case far outside volunteering: when Google announced the end of Google+ in 2018, it gave as a reason that 90 per cent of sessions lasted less than five seconds.¹ This says nothing about volunteer groups. It shows the mechanism: give people no reason to leave the place they are already in, and you get accounts instead of use.

Hypothesis 1: immediate benefit beats later shared benefit

The claim. A tool is adopted when it helps at the moment of use, not when it will help later.

The mechanism. Volunteers work in short windows, usually in the evening alongside work, family or studies. Whatever demands extra effort inside that window gets postponed, and postponed means, in practice, not done. A system fails especially fast when it is experienced as a replacement for a functioning space for conversation.

In everyday life. The minutes go into the chat, because everyone sees them there straight away. They do not go into the repository, because nobody is looking there today.

What would refute it. A group where the shared repository is in use without anyone experiencing its upkeep as extra work — and without the actual work carrying on in the chat alongside it.

Hypothesis 2: what gets funded is what is visible

The claim. Resources flow to where a result can be shown. That is rarely the quiet relief of local work.

The mechanism. Project briefs, budgets and indicators favour activities with a deadline and a visible result: reach, registrations, donations, an event that took place. That can genuinely raise the capacity to act. Maintaining a body of knowledge has no deadline and no tidy figure. This is not intent, it is the logic of funding — at national offices, boards and grant-makers alike.

In everyday life. The group receives a tool for a national activity. It works, but locally it creates work instead of removing it — and after the activity it stands empty.

What would refute it. A funded project whose measure of success is the time saved by volunteers.

Hypothesis 3: the gap is reuse, not communication

The claim. No place to talk is missing, and no community is missing. What is missing is a body of material others can draw on by themselves.

The mechanism. Templates, procedural knowledge, contacts and decisions come into being anyway. They are simply not findable, and not cut in a way that lets another group take them over without asking.

In everyday life. A new volunteer takes over the market stall. How it went last year is known only to someone currently on holiday. So she starts again from the beginning.

What would refute it. A group whose volunteers need materially different things from what their own work produces anyway.

Hypothesis 4: findability can feel like a burden

The claim. What prevents a lasting record is not the effort but the visibility it creates. I have no evidence for this. It is a hypothesis, and it is the one I expect most pushback on.

The mechanism. A searchable archive makes old conflicts, unclear decisions, untidy processes and sensitive contact details more visible. Nobody has to want that covertly. It is enough that the more ephemeral option feels safer at the moment of deciding.

In everyday life. A contested decision is recorded briefly in the minutes, the discussion stays in the chat and has effectively vanished six months later. That is rarely a decision against transparency, more often one in favour of quiet.

What would refute it. Those who introduce such systems hear mainly «we have no time», and not «we would rather not have that on the record».

Seven questions before choosing a tool

They are about adoption, responsibility and collaboration, not about software.

1. Which recurring work is being done in parallel by several groups or people?
2. Which shared action should the tool make easier, and which decision becomes faster because of it?
3. Who gains an immediate advantage the very first time they use it, and what is that advantage?
4. Which social functions does the existing space for conversation serve — questions, humour, encouragement, exchange beyond the group — and how are they preserved?
5. What extra work does the system demand today, and who takes it on by name?
6. Which content belongs in a lasting record, which in a limited working space, and which may stay in informal conversation?
7. How would we recognise in six months that capacity to act, productivity or community actually improved — rather than that something was merely set up?

Anyone who cannot say which of the three goals a tool serves, who takes on the extra work, and how better collaboration would show, is not introducing a tool but a hope.

What I want to hear from you

Three questions for everyone who has introduced such a system in a local group. What carried on alongside it afterwards? What was the real objection — lack of time, no immediate benefit, unclear responsibility, worry about findability, or the threatened loss of a familiar space for conversation? And what actually made lasting use more likely, without damaging the exchange within the group?

Counter-examples are what I want most: groups where a shared repository has run for years without turning into an administrative project of its own. If those exist, hypothesis 1 is wrong, and I want to know. In four weeks I will publish what came back, including what speaks against me.

Quellen

1. Google (Ben Smith): «Project Strobe», 8 October 2018. A primary source for what the company said about its own product, not for usage itself. A consumer network is not a volunteer group; what transfers is the switching-cost mechanism, nothing else. Dokument zurück

This article was produced with partial use of AI tools, including for fact checking. All content has been carefully checked, revised and is my responsibility.