I serve on a team of three people responsible for the overall use and direction of techops.net, which is the support center for Dragon*Con tech staff. The site runs everything: our mailing list, the staff database, tracking of hours worked for each staffer, etc. So in essence, without the tools available on that site, tech staff does not work. Do not pass go, do not collect pie.

Every year after the end of the convention, we sit down at the geekfarm and start brainstorming the tasks we need to accomplish before the next con. And then over the following weeks, we formulate those ideas into specific tasks and get working. In fact, one of my cohorts and I always used to joke that the webteam was the only group inside of tech staff that had no “off-season”. And while it was always something we laughed at, I think that the reason we were laughing was because we knew it was true. At least, that’s how it’s been in the past.

For me, things are still that way. I take a great amount of pride in the work I’ve put into that site, and I’m glad that I contribute in some way to making peoples’ jobs easier. So here I sit, taking a break from my latest batch of code, to get this stuff off my chest and out of my head.

I’ve been working on quite a lot of .net-related stuff over the past several months. I’d like to say “we’ve been working”, referring to the webteam as a whole, but truthfully, that hasn’t been happening.

You see, life gets in the way. Right after the convention, Q started a new job that she’s been excelling in, which, as I’ve said before, is awesome. P has been doing his thing, and I’ve followed the various projects he’s been a part of to see what he’s up to. There’s a downside to this, though, and it’s that other things, other tasks get put on the back burner, and over the past several months, that’s been the site for which all three of us are responsible.

I, on the other hand, have been steadily busy. This is partly because of my recent acquisition of quite a bit of free time, and so initially I thought that I shouldn’t be hard on others who don’t have as much free time as I do.

But then I got to thinking. I’m really not doing anything that I wasn’t doing before, including the period where I had two full-time jobs, one of them in website development. Those other things, even when you add in the social life and the various other etcetera that everyone deals with on a daily basis, didn’t prevent me from meeting my schedule for tasks that I needed to do.  It’s remarkably easy to make time for something when you feel it’s important.

And so my frustration with others grows because I know what I am capable of, and so it makes me wonder why others aren’t the same way. Do they have other priorities?

Well, of course they do. Everyone does. That’s where life intervenes, and people, jobs, hobbies all take their slice of the pie. I certainly don’t begrudge anyone that, but that only excuses a portion of it. I’m annoyed that over the past three years, we’ve tripled the size of the webteam and yet now one person is doing the majority of the work. I’m annoyed that everything has come down to me. Almost without exception, everything we put on the drawing board just after Dragon*Con 2006, including some of the “hey, wouldn’t it be cool if we had this” stuff, I’ve either fully or mostly implemented with very little feedback from others. Add to that the new responsibility of hosting the site on my server for free, and it makes me feel a little more stretched. I don’t feel unappreciated in so much as I feel overwhelmed.

So earlier today, I sent an e-mail to my associates on the webteam regarding a rather important component of the site that would have already been launched if I had more help, and tried to be as cordial as I was able, but I’m afraid that the level of frustration I felt when I wrote it was probably evident. The fact of the matter is that yes, I am frustrated, not at any one person per se, but moreso at the situation that busy lives often cause.

As a friend said to me about the situation:

This is the big problem with volunteer programs. When people get bored, work stops getting done. […] Barring lighting a fire under their asses, the only solution I really know is to recruit new blood, get them excited, and use them until they get bored again.

And therein lies the problem. Either people come around and help out, or they don’t. Unlike other areas of staff, I can’t pick a person out of the crowd and say, “You there, whip me up some code!” What we do has a very different dynamic than what most people traditionally volunteer for. And it makes me almost sad in a way, because not only do I love working with these people when the machine is firing on all cylinders, but outside of this wacky thing we call Dragon*Con, they’re some of the best friends and best people you will ever meet. I just hate feeling like I’m stuck on an island because someone swiped my life raft.