Friday, August 23, 2013

Be a Communities Volunteer!

If you've been to GHC before, then you've probably heard of communities volunteers (or even been one).  If not, this post is for you!

What do Communities Volunteers Do?
Communities Volunteers help build the community for GHC attendees online, mainly by maintaining the GHC wiki and blogging. 

Benefits of Volunteering
Why should you volunteer?
  • As hard as we may try, there's no way we can attend every session.  As a Communities Volunteer, you will be essential in helping attendees find out what happened in the sessions they miss!
  • You'll get an extra boost to your networking ability at the conference: you'll be highly visible as an official blogger / wiki poster - other attendees will recognize you and seek you out to ask questions about the sessions you attended.  In past years, I've made valuable connections as an official blogger and am in contact with them to this day!
  • The chance to see your blog's name in lights!  There will be roughly 4000 attendees at GHC this year.  A great many of them will read your contribution to our communities and you'll see a definite boost to your blog readership/Twitter activity/Klout score/etc.
  • As an Official Blogger/Note-Taker, you’ll receive a cool GHC Communities ribbon for your badge (ribbons are highly coveted at GHC, and the more the better, but only available if you blog/note-take!)
Where Do I Sign Up?
Follow this link and click on 'Volunteer Application' in the right hand column to fill out the application to sign up.
 
Don't have a blog but still want to volunteer?  Don't worry - you can take notes on three or more sessions for our wiki or create a new blog expressly for the purpose of blogging at GHC.  You can also tweet using #ghc13 and/or you can join our Facebook group.  Here is a full list of the online communities associated with the conference:
Any contribution, no matter how small, helps make our online communities richer! 

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

What if you're interested in volunteering, but have been blogging under a pseudonym? Is this allowed? Or does your blog need to specifically state who you are?

Kate said...

Hi there,

Our policy is to have people use their real names. This makes it much easier for us to manage and negates the need for approvals during the conference. Since we want everyone posting within two hours after the session they attend ends.

The added benefit is that people know who you are when they meet you in person.

We've also let people create blogs specifically for GHC, so if you are worried about keeping your other posts anonymous that might be one way to do so. We only ask that you have one sample post available so when we go through the applications we can get a sense of your content/style.

Kate