🌿The Spore

Brought to you by the team at Organizational Mycology

🍽️💩⭐ Glitter, Dirty Dishes and Bags of Poop

Our team works with a whole bunch of organizations that rely on volunteer labor (e.g., open source software projects and non-profits). That work compels us to think a lot about what motivates volunteers to do the work, how those motivations shape the tasks they agree to take on, and how work is broken up between people (or not).

We then started to think about the organizations we volunteer in ourselves: a worker-owned pay-what-you-like cafe, a local county animal shelter, and a grief center. We were talking about the tasks that nobody likes to do, which accumulate until there is a signal that they need to be done. Who does the dishes at a busy collective worker cafe? Who empties the bins overflowing with dog poop at an animal shelter? And who vacuums the glitter off the floor after a session with kids in the art-room? In non-volunteer organizations, someone is assigned to do them; in volunteer organizations, tasks like these often have no formal delegation; someone just has to recognize the issue and take care of it.

We thought this was a great metaphor for open science and open source organizations who themselves have piles of poop that need to be discarded or accumulating dishes that need to be done or glitter that needs to just… go away (except for those little bits you keep finding on your clothes and in your hair weeks later). But these tasks in the digital world often do not have the visual or… scent-based cues we rely on in other settings, and often they fall out of the purview of any one person’s job. 

What are the practices in your organization that point out the overflowing kitchen sink, or accumulating problems that need collective attention? Is it how long a PR sits without review? Do these things accumulate until the flies are buzzing around for your organization? Who are the people that tend to step in and “clean up the mess”? 

When we build virtual organizations that are far flung, we can often miss these festering piles, so our challenge to you is to grab a few colleagues or collaborators and tackle some of them. Bug BBQs, documentation sprints, and collaboration cafes are all great places to build a norm for your group and your organization about having a sniff around your operation and seeing if some regular mutual time and attention can do the work that needs to be done to keep the organization running. 

Short updates 

• 🛫 Beth just came back from sharing thoughts on the infrastructure of qualitative research at the Institute of Open Science Practices: ​​ https://iosp.io/ in Denver. It was a generative meeting with lots of great conversations with open source science leaders. 
• 🥼We still have our EOI open around Foundations of Open Science Leadership https://orgmycology.com/fosl-eoi/
• 🌿 Beth has continued her personal project called Everyday Flourishing connecting ecological principles with everyday life: http://www.everydayflourishing.org/ The resource she built is openly available and there are workshops each month. You’re invited to attend!  
• 📚 We’re continuing to develop more resources from the CZI EOSS Community Calls. Check them out, and please feel free to share, adapt, and contribute!