Thoughts on how to onboard volunteers/collaborators

Volunteers are super flaky, i.e. often abandon projects with no warning. I think the main reason for this is planning fallacy. People promise more than they actually have time for. Best case they will just be honest about this when they notice. But more typically the person will feel some mix of stress, shame and overwhelm that prevents them from communicating clearly. From the outside this looks like person promised to do a lot of things and then just ghosts the project. (This is a common pattern and not a specific accusation of any specific person.)

I don't think I'm particularly good at volunteer management. But I have a few methods that I find very useful to avoid having the volunteers be net negative from my perspective. Which one depends on what fits the project. When ever I don't do at least one of these precaution, I always end up regretting it, except if the person is someone I know well from before, and already have specific reasons to trust.

1. Give the volunteer a task which isn't essential, so that if they drop out, that is ok. E.g. if I run an event and someone want's to help then I would still make plans as if I did not have their help. After I've filled my to do-list with all the most important things, I would consider what non essential extras would be nice-to-have for the event, and give those tasks away.
2. Have enough volunteers that if half of them drop out, this is still ok.
3. Don't invest any more time in them than the amount of work they've already put in. This could look like asking them to pre-reading before I invest time in onboarding. There are some obvious failure modes here, if both sides have this approach to a mutual collaboration. I think the solution is to ask people to do work that they want to do for it's own sake, if and only if they are the person that has both sufficient time and interest in the project. (This point is specifically if your goal for doing onboarding is that you expect to get a collaborator out if it. E.g. when I did AISC career coaching calls, I deliberately did not have any barrier to book a 1h call with me. Because my aim then was to gift support, not trade for mutual benefits.)  
4. Give them opportunities to take initiative. In my opinion, the best collaborator is someone who takes their own initiative, rather than wait for directions. This also happens to corelate somewhat (but not perfectly) with actually finishing the task they promise to do. I expect this is largely because initiativ and task completion both flows from sense of ownership. Ways to do this could be as simple as just telling them that you want them to take initiative, or you can give them a list of half specified task, to chose from but let them figure out the details. If you give people an opportunity to take initiative, most people will not do this, but this is not a failure mode. Remember that most people offering to volunteer actually don't have time for this. You want to filter for who will actually do the work, and if filtering for initiative did not filter out most people, that would mean it wasn't a good enough filter.
5. Advertise that you're project exists but don't advertise that you're looking for help (even if you are). This way the people who reach out to join is at least somewhat filtered for initiativ.

Generally, any filter that does not filter out most people, is not enough of a filter. But also, just because a filter does filter out most people does not mean it's any good. The filter also need to filter for the right few people. 

Also, my own experience is that the best collaborations happens organically. The first AISC organiser team formed because I wondered around EAG and talked about an idea I had, and over the weekend and a few days after, several people decided to join the team. I didn't even ask anyone to join, people just joined. AISS was first set up by me, not intended to be more than me, but people asked to help, so I put them all in a slack, and when I had a task I wanted to outsource I asked in the slack. Most people who joined never engaged again, but one person JJ, was very active and started to take more and more initiative, and around 2 months later we decided to be co-founders of AISS. My current research project came from me asking one of my AI safety researcher flatmates for a math quest. 

The problem with this is sometimes you don't find help organically and need to cast a wider net, e.g. write a public post asking for volunteers/collaborators for your project. But when doing this you'll get a lot of people reaching out, who have not though through if this is something they would prioritise enough given their current time constraints, and then you get the problem I described at the top of this quick take. 

I wrote down some ways I try to deal with this. I can't say I've had a lot of success with volunteer managing, but at least if I follow the advice above, things don't go terribly wrong. E.g. I've goten some use of volunteers at events, and as far as I know the volunteers where happy too.

Volunteer management is very different from outsourcing to someone you pay to do the work. Often when people have opinion on how to manage a team, they draw from their professional experience, which does not straightforwardly translate, or just doesn't address the biggest problems, since they are volunteer specific.

I don't know of any good volunteer management guide, but they probably exist? If anyone with at least some volunteer management experience know of a good guide that you yourself have read and endorse, than I'd be interested in a link. 

I'm not expecting to do any volunteer management my self anytime soon, but I'm advising on more than one project who would benefit from a good guide like that.