[MUD-Dev] Criminalize Community Volunteers?

[John Buehler]

> Madrona Tree
> Sent: Tuesday, September 05, 2000 9:00 PM

> If I were on the jury, I'd find for the plantiffs.  I do not believe a
> service such as AOL (or EQ or UO or any other such for-profit
> corporation) should use volunteer labor.  They are taking away a job
> from a person who really needs one.  If they need help running their
> service, that's fine -- just hire somebody to do it.  That's the way the
> world works.  And what better employee to have than the people who have
> already shown that they'd do their job for free!

This strikes me as very strange, Madrona.  If AOL cannot financially tolerate
paying salary, paying benefits, as well as managing and equipping that many
employees, why insist that they be employees?  Such insistence means that
certain business opportunities will simply have to be passed over as
non-viable.  And those business opportunities can be very interesting to the
potential customers.  The use of volunteers permits a new business model to
emerge, which is a hybrid of corporation and volunteer organization.  AOL may
have blown their opportunity to pioneer such an approach because they
manipulated and acted towards their volunteer arm with disrespect, but that
doesn't mean that the approach doesn't or wouldn't work.

Surely an example of an extensive volunteer effort underpinning some element
of a corporation's business must exist today.  Perhaps not on the scale of
AOL's services.

JB





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