---
title: Cross-Pollinate Your Volunteering
osem_url: https://osem.seagl.org/conferences/seagl2022/program/proposals/887
beginning: '2022-11-04T13:30:00.000-07:00'
end: '2022-11-04T14:00:00.000-07:00'
resources:
  internet_archive_identifier: SeaGL2022-Deb_Nicholson-Cross-Pollinate_Your_Volunteering
presenters:
- name: Deb Nicholson
  affiliation: SeaGL
  osem_url: https://osem.seagl.org/users/32
  gravatar_id: ad818bec4900cb3354d2aa536a7bf207
  biography: Deb Nicholson is a free software policy expert and a passionate community
    advocate. She is the General Manager at the Open Source Initiative which stewards
    the Open Source Definition and works to raise awareness and adoption of open source
    software. She is also a founding organizer of the Seattle GNU/Linux Conference,
    an annual event dedicated to surfacing new voices and welcoming new people to
    the free software community. She lives with her husband and her lucky black cat
    in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
---

Become a better volunteer and maybe even a better person by diversifying the kind of organizations you volunteer for. It sometimes feels like FOSS non-profits are re-inventing the wheel with regards to tasks like outreach, volunteer recruitment and retention, community governance and strategic planning. But mission based work has been around for a long, long time and so there's a huge community of non-technical practitioners building community. The value of cross-pollination goes both ways, you can help less technical non-profits think clearly about the role technology plays in their work, while learning about the organizational skills that every volunteer-driven project relies on.

The speaker will discuss the joys of mixing up your volunteering for your own benefit and for the benefit of all the places you give your time to. If you're up for thinking deeply about the kind of volunteer you want to be over the course of your life, then this talk is for you.
