A Week in the Life of a Perl Community Volunteer
I’m involved with a couple of Perl organisations and from time to time I am asked to blog about the things that I am doing. The problem though is that a lot of what I do isn’t overly interesting and can simply be incredibly dull administration. This week I decided to make some notes on what I have been doing, but I don’t plan to do this every week. At the minute I am trying to fit my volunteer work around doing fun things with my house guests and I’m having to schedule in the time, which means I’ve a much better idea of how long everything is taking.
I’m on the YEF venue committee and at this time of the year we work on choosing the venue for next year’s YAPC::EU. We have two proposals this year and I spent an hour or so on each, going through them to see if I had any queries about the proposals.
I’m working on a legal matter for TPF that I unfortunately I can’t discuss the details of yet. I spent about 4 hours on this on Sunday, 1 hour on Monday, 1 hour on Tuesday, 3o minutes on Wednesday, 30 minutes on Thursday, 1 hour on Friday, and 1 hour on Saturday. It’s exceptional for me to spend quite so much time on one thing but it looks like I will be spending quite a bit of time on this matter throughout the summer.
I’m the TPF grant manager for Dave Mitchell’s grant and I spent around an hour on this.
I spend a lot of time reading and responding to email. This week I have sent 61 emails either as responses to queries or initiating new conversations. If I take out the emails that are related to tasks that I already mentioned this took up about 7 hours. The main categories of emails at the minute seem to be Hague Grants, general administration, volunteers, and YAPC. I have also spent time chatting to people about projects and dealing with blogs.
All in all this week I spent around 20 hours, which is about usual for me.
July 12th, 2010 at 7:19 am
I am very grateful to you for all the time and energy you invest in the Perl community and thank you for this post too. I think it is very important that you keep the community informed on what kind of things you spend your time.
Especially if you feel that these aren’t interesting tasks. Especially if these tasks are otherwise not visible to the rest of us.
I think if you decide to write these entries once a week you will soon, within a few weeks, will see that you can point out areas where people might help you. I am sure there are many people in the Perl community who would be ready to help in some of those tasks. That in turn will either let you reduce your workload or allow you to attend other tasks as well.
Thank you!
July 13th, 2010 at 12:45 am
Thank you.
Many of the day-to-day tasks are not interesting as they are contacting people for updates or chasing up things that have not yet been done. I have very long “follow-up” and “waiting-for” queues. But then as TPF President is really a general manager it is not shocking that I have so many of these management tasks.
At the minute it is not my aim to reduce my workload, but as you suggested I want to pass on certain tasks so that I can attend to other things. I will continue to work on that!