Activities of coordinators:

  The coordinator is the heart and soul of a team (but not necessarily the muscle).

The major role of the coordinator is to keep the group productive. This requires to maintain its membership by, for instance, recruiting new members, making new members feel welcome and part of the group, checking that the new member is indeed a desirable addition and guiding the members into tasks that are best suited for them. A secondary role is to keep track of the progress made by the members in their work, but this task can be delegated to a team member. The coordinator can make his/her role as big as he/she wishes in expanding the course offering and improving student learning on PEOI.

Maintaining membership in the team:
First of all, the coordinator must maintain the team and seek to expand it. New volunteers are recruited from a number of services such as Online Volunteering and volunteermatch.org. Listings have been placed on these and several other web sites. But the listings expire every 90 days on Online Volunteering and every 180 days on volunteermatch.org, and these listings need to be posted again when they have expired. In addition, new listing may need to be placed as the tasks in the team change. To make sure that the coordinator is notified of the expiration of the listings and of new expressions of interest form volunteers, the coordinator must be the administrator of the listing on these web sites.  

Welcoming new volunteers :
Expressions of interest for new volunteers will be emailed to the coordinator once he/she is the administrator of the listings. A welcome message should be sent to each new volunteer, along with some guidance on the registration procedure and the type of work best suited for the volunteer's background. It is crucial that the new volunteer be told to join the team, otherwise his/her name will not appear in the team's roster and the coordinator will not know that a volunteer has registered. Once the volunteer has registered and completed the email address verification step, the coordinator should clear the new volunteer's registration.

Clearing, modifying and removing volunteer's registration:
Clearing a volunteer's registration is done in "My registration" part of "My account" of the coordinator. The coordinator can open the registration form of every member of the team by selecting the volunteer's name in the bottom menu and clicking on either "faculty" or "staff" as the case may be. Clearing the volunteer's registration requires putting "0" (i.e. zero) in the "deficiencies" box, your name or initials in "verifiedby", and the date in "dateverified" (in the form 2005-04-26), and clicking on Save in the "Modifying deficiencies, contact and evaluation" box. Explanations for clearing volunteer's registration appear at the bottom of the "My registration" page. Naturally, the coordinator must clear the registration of volunteers only if the registration appears legitimate and worthwhile. If the volunteer does not seem to belong to the group notify John Petroff. The coordinator can make changes in the registration form of the volunteer (for instance, if the language of work or the qualification have not been properly set), and can remove the registration of the volunteer altogether (by cliking on "Remove";  which causes the registration to be archived.)

Assigning tasks:
After reviewing a new volunteer's registration form and CV (if one has been supplied), it will be possible to suggest appropriate tasks to the volunteer. At the same time, guidance should be provided on where to find explanation of how to complete the task (e.g. in Volunteers needed, explanations in the "Authors" section and each respective procedure). The tasks can be assigned by the coordinator (see the explanations in "Select my tasks"), or the volunteer can choose them him/herself in "Select my tasks".  

Verifying and finalizing team member work:
For most tasks, the coordinator receives short email messages reporting on the progress made by team members in their tasks. One such email will be a "Notification" that work is completed on a given page. The coordinator may choose to assign the editing to a team member, or finalize the task by moving the page to its permanent folder. Moving a page to its permanent folder is performed in the same procedure as where the work was (i.e. "Edit text", "Edit questions", "Edit cases", "Edit pages" or "Edit procedures"). In the procedure, the coordinator should choose the name of the team member in the bottom menu so as to perform work on that team member's behalf. Then, open the page of the work (by changing language, course, chapter and/or section as needed). Finally, after verifying that the page is in good order, click on the button "Move to permanent folder". This step will

- copy the file to the permanent folder
- remove the work file from the temporary folder
- record the task as the completed tasks table for that volunteer
- delete the task assignment from the assigned tasks table
- send an email message to the team member
Note that the task itself will not be remove from existing tasks, and it can be reassigned for instance to expand or update the page.  

Creating new projects and setting up new tasks:
As work is completed on some projects, new projects will come on line (such as creating a new course or translating a newly completed course). Some may be initiated by the coordinator him/herself. Creating or modifying a project and its tasks is performed with the "Set up projects" procedure which is found in the "Projects" section. There are now 23 standardized project types and 35 standardized tasks. Setting up a project should consist of using the automated process of giving a name to a project, specifying the course for which is intended, selecting from the standardized project types, and when the project is created, using the automated process of inserting tasks in the project. If need be, new project types can be set up with the "Edit project names" (accessible directly from the Set up project procedure). Likewise, new tasks can be created with the "Edit task names" procedure (also accessible from the "Set up project" procedure).

Team strategy:
With the exception of clearing a new volunteer's registration, all activities of the coordinator can be delegated to team members, this includes the process of setting up new projects and moving pages to permanent folders. But the coordinator should continue to be in charge of the overall strategy for the team, and that includes recruiting new members, proposing new projects, improving the appearance of the pages (such as the welcome pages of sections), seeking parnterships, attracting students, suggesting new courses, soliciting new authors. The strategy should be developed in conjunction with PEOI's administration, board of directors and other team coordinators.  

For comments and suggestions, please email to John Petroff listed in contact information.