1) What is the purpose of the Big Voluntary Group?
That is still to be defined. I am interested in capturing the kindness and camaraderie we saw on display volunteering in some form. I think the group would max out at about 250 or so people, maybe slightly more. And then we can decide if we want to grow and build something larger and get serious about volunteering as a force for society (my original inspiration) or treat this as a budding group of friends. I don't want to impose anything haha. Up to us — we see how to scale this culture for the benefit of society, writ large. Yes, grandiose.
2) What are the projects already mentioned?
I want to build a photo upload area so all vols involved at USTA and Rockefeller Center can share photos by date. I think a collaborative album with annotations would be pretty great. Looking into apps/prefab stuff that allow self hosting so they don't incur a monthly fee. Suggestions welcome. Also interested in a group order for a t-shirt. With enough people, we could all kick in and take over a big boat and have a sunset charter one night later this year.
3) How big is the group? When did it start?
At the moment (11AM, July 20), it is 213 members. When the founding text was published on July 18, we had 172 members, as the group was the "USTA Queens Legacy Group," volunteers who had served at the USTA and wanted to keep in touch after June 28. Since the Rockefeller Center group ("FIFA Vols @ RockCenter") has north of 300 members (many of which are already members of The Big Voluntary Group) I anticipate another maybe 30-100 people coming into this group. I'd be surprised if we get more than about 250 people to start with.
4) Is The Big Voluntary Group open to other volunteers?
At the moment, yes and no. Yes in spirit, but I have to put some thought into this. A WhatsApp group is only sufficient to handle the conversations of really up to 100 or so people. After that, it becomes quite a firehose of content, and if you step away for a day, you will have over 1,000 unread messages. So before allowing a larger group of people in, I'd need to migrate the community into a forum. One possibility is Reddit, or a Facebook group, etc. There are pros and cons to every solution. I am open to rolling our own website and software, but I'd need to schedule time to do this and roll up my sleeves. I think the first step is to see how the group lives for a few weeks, to see if my hunch that this group of people is an amazing starting point for something potentially much bigger, pans out.
5) What's next?
As the group founder/moderator, I start a 5 week commitment on July 23, which means my time to invest in the community will be more limited. But I will definitely keep an eye on the group as much as I can, and will tend to it and nurture it with an eye towards investing in this community over time. So far, there has only been one instance of needed moderation (that I am aware of) so I am hopeful that the culture we started IRL can continue and folks can self moderate, give each other grace, etc. If all of that happens, we are off to a good start, let's see what happens in September and beyond.