volunteering

[Bloganuary] Not The Lottery

This post is part of my attempt at Bloganuary 2024. Today’s prompt is:

What would you do if you won the lottery?

I know what I’d do, and I’ll get to that. But first, let me tell you about the lottery game I play.

"LOTTO Schleswig-Holstein" player slip with two "series" of numbers selected: in game one, all the numbers ending 7, and the lucky stars 1 and 2; in the second game, the first five numbers (the lucky stars aren't visible). — “Why yes, my numbers are 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, with lucky stars 6 and 7. What do you mean, they’ll never come up? They’re just as likely as yours!”

Not the lottery

I don’t generally play the lottery¹. I’ve made interactive widgets (now broken) to illustrate quite how many losers there are in these games and hopefully help highlight that while “it could be you”… it won’t be.

But if I ever happen to be somewhere that the lottery results are being announced, I sometimes like to play a game I call Not The Lottery.² Here’s how you play:

Set aside the money it would have cost for a ticket.
Think of the numbers you’d have played.
When those numbers don’t come up, congratulations: you just won not-wasting-your-money!³

Want to play Not The Lottery retroactively? Cool. I’ve made and open-sourced a tool for that. Hopefully it’ll load below and you can choose some numbers (or take a Lucky Dip) and have it played through the entirety of EuroMillions history and see how much money you’d have won if you’d only played them every week. Or, to look at things from a brighter perspective, how much you’ve saved by not playing. It’s almost-certainly in the thousands.

Loading game… please wait… (if it never loads, Dan probably broke it; sorry!)

Winning the lottery

But that’s not what the question’s really about, is it? We don’t ask people “what would they do if they won the lottery?” because we think it’s likely to happen⁴ We ask them because… well, because it’s fun to fantasise.

And I sort-of gave the answer away on day 20 of Bloganuary: I’d do my “dream job”. I’d work (for free) for Three Rings, like I already do, except instead of spending a couple of hours a week on it on average I’d spend about ten times that. I’d use the luxury of not having to work to focus on things that I know I can do to make the world a better place.

Dan poses in the centre of a group of seven other Three Rings volunteers. — If money was no object, I’d spend more time with these happy folks (and many more besides), making volunteering easier for everybody.

Sure, there’s other things I’d do. They’re mostly obvious things that I’d hope anybody in my position would do. Pay off the mortgage (and for all the works currently being done to ~~infuriate the dog~~ improve the house). Arrange some kind of slow-access trust or annuity for the people closest to me so that they need not worry about money, nor about having to work out how to spend, save, or invest a lump sum. Maybe a holiday or two. Certainly some charitable donations. Perhaps buy really expensive ketchup: the finest dijon ketchup⁵.

But mostly I’d just want to be able to live as comfortably as I do now, or perhaps slightly more, and spend a greater proportion of my time than I already do making charities work better.

I don’t know if that makes me insufferably self-righteous or insufferably simple-minded, but it’s probably one of those.

¹ I’ve been caught describing it as “a tax on people who are bad at maths”, but I don’t truly believe that (although I am concerned about how readily we let people get addicted to problematic gambling and then keep encouraging them to play with dark patterns that hide how low the odds truly are). I’ve even been known to buy a ticket or two, some years.

² While writing this, I decided to retroactively play for last Friday, having not seen whatever numbers came up. I guessed only one of them. Hurrah! That means I saved £2.50 by not playing!

³ There are, of course, other possible outcomes. You could have missed out on winning a small prize – the odds aren’t that low – but the solution to this is simple: just keep playing Not The Lottery and you, as the “house”, will come out on top in the end. Alternatively, it’s just-about possible that you could pluck the jackpot numbers from thin air, in which case: well done! You’re doing better than Derren Brown when in 2009 he performed a pretty good magic trick but then turned it into a turd when he “explained” it using pseudoscience (why not just stick with “I’m a magician, duh”; when you play the Uri Geller card you just make yourself look like an idiot). Let’s find a way to use those superpowers for good. Because what you’ve got is a superpower. For context: if you played Not The Lottery twice a week, every week, without fail, for 393 years… you’d still only have a 1% chance of having ever predicted a jackpot in your five-lifetimes.

⁴ What if we lived in a world where we did use statistics to think about the hypothetical questions we ask people? Would we ask “what would you do if you were stuck by lightning?”, given that the lifetime chance of being killed by lightning is significantly greater than the chance of winning the jackpot, even if you play every draw!

⁵ Y’know, to keep in the fridge in the treehouse.

[Bloganuary] Dream Job

This post is part of my attempt at Bloganuary 2024. Today’s prompt is:

What’s your dream job?

It feels like a bit of a cop-out to say I’m already doing it, but that’s true. Well, mostly (read on and I’ll make a counterpoint!).

Automattic

Dan (wearing a rainbow bandana) waves at the camera; behind him are four work colleagues, and behind that the Colosseum in Rome. — Getting to hang out with my awesome teammates in various locations around the globe is a plus.

I’m incredibly fortunate that my job gets to tick so many of the boxes I’d put on a “dream job wishlist”:

I work on things that really matter. Automattic’s products make Web publishing and eCommerce available to the world without “lock-in” or proprietary bullshit. I genuinely believe that Automattic’s work helps to democratise the Internet and acts, in a small way, as a counterbalance to the dominance of the big social media silos.
I get to make the world a better place by giving away as much intellectual property as possible. Automattic’s internal policy is basically “you don’t have to ask to open source something; give away anything you like so long as it’s not the passwords”.¹ Open Source is one of the most powerful ideas of our generation, and all that.
We work in a distributed, asynchronous way. I work from where I want, when I want. I’m given the autonomy to understand what my ideal working environment is and make the most of it. Some mornings I’m just not feeling that coding flow, so I cycle somewhere different and try working the afternoon in a different location. Some weekends I’m struck by inspiration and fire up my work laptop to make the most of it, because, y’know, I’m working on things that really matter and I care about them.
I work with amazing people who I learn from and inspire me. Automattic’s home to some incredibly talented people and I love that I’ve managed to find a place that actively pushes me to study new things every day.
Automattic’s commitment to diversity & inclusion is very good-to-excellent. As well as getting work work alongside people from a hundred different countries and with amazingly different backgrounds, I love that I get to work in one of the queerest and most queer-affirming environments I’ve ever been paid to be in.

Did I mention that we’re hiring?²

Three Rings

Dan sits at a boardroom table in an airy, bright room. He's wearing an Automattic t-shirt that reads "Let's make the Web a better place." In the background, several other people discuss a pile of post-it notes that have begun to pile up on the table. — I don’t know how I managed to select a photo of my fun-loving kickass volunteers that’s somehow more dry and corporate than the photo of my work colleagues above.

But you know where else ticks all of those boxes? My voluntary work with Three Rings. Let me talk you through that wishlist again:

I work on things that really matter. We produce the longest-running volunteer management system in the world³ We produce it as volunteers ourselves, because we believe that volunteering matters and we want to make it as easy as possible for as many people as possible to do as much good as possible, and this allows us to give it away as cheaply as possible: for free, to the smallest and poorest charities.
I get to make the world a better place by facilitating the work of suicide helplines, citizens advice bureaus, child support services, environmental charities, community libraries and similar enterprises, museums, theatres, charity fundraisers, and so many more good works. Back when I used to to helpline volunteering I might do a three hour shift and help one or two people, and I was… okay at it. Now I get to spend those three hours making tools that facilitate many tens of thousands of volunteers to provide services that benefit an even greater number of people across six countries.
We work in a distributed, asynchronous way. Mostly I work from home; sometimes we get together and do things as a team (like in the photo above). Either way, I’m trusted with the autonomy to produce awesome things in the way that works best for me, backed with the help and support of a team that care with all their hearts about what we do.
I work with amazing people who I learn from and inspire me. I mentioned one of them yesterday. But seriously, I could sing the praises of any one of our two-dozen strong team, whether for their commitment to our goals, their dedication to making the world better, their passion for quality and improvement, their focus when producing things that meet our goals, or their commitment to sticking with us for years or decades, without pay, simply because they know that what we do is important and necessary for so many worthy causes. And my fellow development/devops volunteers continue to introduce me to new things, which scratches my “drive-to-learn” itch.
Three Rings’ commitment to diversity & inclusion is very good, and improving. We skew slightly queer and have moderately-diverse gender mix, but I’m especially impressed with our age range these days: there’s at least 50 years between our oldest and youngest volunteers with a reasonably-even spread throughout, which is super cool (and the kind of thing many voluntary organisations dream of!).

The difference

The biggest difference between these two amazing things I get to work on is… only one of them pays me. It’s hard to disregard that.

Sometimes at Automattic, I have to work on something that’s not my favourite project in the world. Or the company’s priorities clash with my own, and I end up implementing something that my gut tells me isn’t the best use of my time from a “make the world a better place” perspective. Occasionally they take a punt on something that really pisses me off.

That’s all okay, of course, because they pay me, and I have a mortgage to settle. That’s fine. That’s part of the deal.

My voluntary work at Three Rings is more… mine. I’m the founder of the project; I 100% believe in what it’s trying to achieve. Even though I’ve worked to undermine the power of my “founder privilege” by entrusting the organisation to a board and exec that I know will push back and challenge me, I feel safe fully trusting that everything I give to Three Rings will be used in the spirit of the original mission. And even though I might sometimes disagree with others on the best way forward, I accept that whatever decision is made comes from a stronger backing than if I’d acted alone.

Three Rings, of course, doesn’t pay me⁴. That’s why I can only give them a few hours a week of my time. If I could give more, I would, but I have bills to pay so my “day job” is important too: I’m just so incredibly fortunate that that “day job” touches upon many of the same drives that are similarly satisfied by my voluntary work.

If I didn’t have bills to pay, I could happily just volunteer for Three Rings. I’d miss Automattic, of course: there are some amazing folks there whom I love very much, and I love the work. But if they paid me as little as Three Rings did – that is, nothing! – I’d choose Three Rings in a heartbeat.

But man, what a privileged position I’m in that I can be asked what my dream job is and I can answer “well, it’s either this thing that I already do, or this other thing that I already do, depending on whether this hypothetical scenario considers money to be a relevant factor.” I’m a lucky, lucky man.

¹ I’m badly-paraphrasing Matt, but you get the gist.

² Automattic’s not hiring as actively nor voraciously as it has been for the last few years – a recent downtown in the tech sector which you may have seen have heavily affected many tech companies has flooded the market with talent, and we’ve managed to take our fill of them – we’re still always interested to hear from people who believe in what we do and have skills that we can make use of. And because we’re a community with a lot of bloggers, you can find plenty of first-hand experiences of our culture online if you’d like to solicit some opinions before you apply…

³ Disclaimer: Three Rings is the oldest still-running volunteer management system we’re aware of: our nearest surviving “competitor”, which provides similar-but-different features for a price that’s an order of magnitude greater, launched later in the same year we started. But maybe somebody else has been running these last 22 years that we haven’t noticed, yet: you never know!

⁴ Assuming you don’t count a Christmas dinner each January – yes, really! (it turns out to be cheaper to celebrate Christmas in January) – as payment.

Bisect your Priority of Constituencies

Your product, service, or organisation almost certainly has a priority of constituencies, even if it’s not written down or otherwise formally-encoded. A famous example would be that expressed in the Web Platform Design Principles. It dictates how you decide between two competing needs, all other things being equal.

At Three Rings, for example, our priority of constituencies might¹ look like this:

The needs of volunteers are more important than
The needs of voluntary organisations, which are more important than
Continuation of the Three Rings service, which is more important than
Adherance to technical standards and best practice, which is more important than
Development of new features

These are all things we care about, but we’re talking about where we might choose to rank them, relative to one another.

The priorities and constituencies portrayed in this illustration are ficticious. Any resemblence to real priorities and constituencies, whether living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

The priorities of an organisation you’re involved with won’t be the same: perhaps it includes shareholders, regulatory compliance, different kinds of end-users, employees, profits, different measures of social good, or various measurable outputs. That’s fine: every system is different.

But what I’d challenge you to do is find ways to bisect your priorities. Invent scenarios that pit each constituency against itself another and discuss how they should be prioritised, all other things being equal.

Using the example above, I might ask “which is more important?” in each category:

The needs of the volunteers developing Three Rings, or the needs of the volunteers who use it?
The needs of organisations that currently use the system, or the needs of organisations that are considering using it?
Achieving a high level of uptime, or promptly installing system updates?
Compliance with standards as-written, or maximum compatibility with devices as-used?
Implementation of new features that are the most popular user requests, or those which provide the biggest impact-to-effort payoff?

These might not be your answers to the same questions. They’re not even necessarily mine, and they’re even less-likely to be representative of Three Rings CIC. It’s just illustrative.

The aim of the exercise isn’t to come up with a set of commandments for your company. If you come up with something you can codify, that’s great, but if you and your stakeholders just use it as an exercise in understanding the relative importance of different goals, that’s great too. Finding where people disagree is more-important than having a unifying creed².

And of course this exercise applicable to more than just organisational priorities. Use it for projects or standards. Use it for systems where you’re the only participant, as a thought exercise. A priority of constituencies can be a beautiful thing, but you can understand it better if you’re willing to take it apart once in a while. Bisect your priorities, and see what you find.

¹ Three Rings doesn’t have an explicit priority of constituencies: the example I give is based on my own interpretation, but I’m only a small part of the organisation.

² Having a creed is awesome too, though, as I’ve said before.

Pronouns in Three Rings

The Old Way

Prior to 2018, Three Rings had a relatively simple approach to how it would use pronouns when referring to volunteers.

If the volunteer’s gender was specified as a “masculine” gender (which particular options are available depends on the volunteer’s organisation, but might include “male”, “man”, “cis man”, and “trans man”), the system would use traditional masculine pronouns like “he”, “his”, “him” etc.

If the gender was specified as a “feminine” gender (e.g .”female”, “woman”, “cis women”, “trans woman”) the system would use traditional feminine pronouns like “she”, “hers”, “her” etc.

For any other answer, no specified answer, or an organisation that doesn’t track gender, we’d use singular “they” pronouns. Simple!

This selection was reflected throughout the system. Three Rings might say:

They have done 7 shifts by themselves.
She verified her email address was hers.
Would you like to sign him up to this shift?

Unfortunately, this approach didn’t reflect the diversity of personal pronouns nor how they’re applied. It didn’t support volunteer whose gender and pronouns are not conventionally-connected (“I am a woman and I use ‘them/they’ pronouns”), nor did it respect volunteers whose pronouns are not in one of these three sets (“I use ze/zir pronouns”)… a position it took me an embarrassingly long time to fully comprehend.

So we took a new approach:

The New Way

From 2018 we allowed organisations to add a “Pronouns” property, allowing volunteers to select from 13 different pronoun sets. If they did so, we’d use it; failing that we’d continue to assume based on gender if it was available, or else use the singular “they”.

Let’s take a quick linguistics break

Three Rings‘ pronoun field always shows five personal pronouns, separated by slashes, because you can’t necessarily derive one from another. That’s one for each of five types:

the subject, used when the person you’re talking about is primary argument to a verb (“he called”),
object, for when the person you’re talking about is the secondary argument to a transitive verb (“he called her“),
dependent possessive, for talking about a noun that belongs to a person (“this is their shift”),
independent possessive, for talking about something that belongs to a person potentially would an explicit noun (“this is theirs“), and the
reflexive (and intensive), two types which are generally the same in English, used mostly in Three Rings when a person is both the subject and indeirect of a verb (“she signed herself up to a shift”).

Let’s see what those look like – here are the 13 pronoun sets supported by Three Rings at the time of writing:

Subject	Object	Possessive		Reflexive/intensive
Subject	Object	Dependent	Independent	Reflexive/intensive
he	him	his		himself
she	her		hers	herself
they	them	their	theirs	themselves
e	em	eir	eirs	emself
ey	em	eir	eirs	eirself
hou	hee	hy	hine	hyself
hu	hum	hus		humself
ne	nem	nir	nirs	nemself
per			pers	perself
thon		thons		thonself
ve	ver	vis		verself
xe	xem	xyr	xyrs	xemself
ze	zir		zirs	zemself

That’s all data-driven rather than hard-coded, by the way, so adding additional pronoun sets is very easy for our developers. In fact, it’s even possible for us to apply an additional “override” on an individual, case-by-case basis: all we need to do is specify the five requisite personal pronouns, separated by slashes, and Three Rings understands how to use them.

Writing code that respects pronouns

Behind the scenes, the developers use a (binary-gendered, for simplicity) convenience function to produce output, and the system corrects for the pronouns appropriate to the volunteer in question:

<%= @volunteer.his_her.capitalize %>
account has been created for
<%= @volunteer.him_her %>
so
<%= @volunteer.he_she %>
can now log in.

The code above will, dependent on the pronouns specified for the volunteer @volunteer, output something like:

His account has been created for him so he can now log in.
Her account has been created for her so she can now log in.
Their account has been created for them so they can now log in.
Eir account has been created for em so ey can now log in.
Etc.

We’ve got extended functions to automatically detect cases where the use of second person pronouns might be required (“Your account has been created for you so you can now log in.”) as well as to help us handle the fact that we say “they are” but “he/she/ey/ze/etc. is“.

It’s all pretty magical and “just works” from a developer’s perspective. I’m sure most of our volunteer developers don’t think about the impact of pronouns at all when they code; they just get on with it.

Is that a complete solution?

Does this go far enough? Possibly not. This week, one of our customers contacted us to ask:

Is there any way to give the option to input your own pronouns? I ask as some people go by she/them or he/them and this option is not included…

You can probably see what’s happened here: some organisations have taken our pronouns property – which exists primarily to teach the system itself how to talk about volunteers – and are using it to facilitate their volunteers telling one another what their pronouns are.

What’s the difference? Well:

When a human discloses that their pronouns are “she/they” to another human, they’re saying “You can refer to me using either traditional feminine pronouns (she/her/hers etc.) or the epicene singular ‘they’ (they/their/theirs etc.)”.

But if you told Three Rings your pronouns were “she/her/their/theirs/themselves”, it would end up using a mixture of the two, even in the same sentence! Consider:

She has done 7 shifts by themselves.
She verified her email address was theirs.

That’s some pretty clunky English right there! Mixing pronoun sets for the same person within a sentence is especially ugly, but even mixing them within the same page can cause confusion. We can’t trivially meet this customer’s request simply by adding new pronoun sets which mix things up a bit! We need to get smarter.

A Newer Way?

Ultimately, we’re probably going to need to differentiate between a more-rigid “what pronouns should Three Rings use when talking about you” and a more-flexible, perhaps optional “what pronouns should other humans use for you”? Alternatively, maybe we could allow people to select multiple pronoun sets to display but Three Rings would only use one of them (at least, one of them at a time!): “which of the following sets of pronouns do you use: select as many as apply”?

Even after this, there’ll always be more work to do.

For instance: I’ve met at least one person who uses no pronouns! By this, they actually mean they use no third-person personal pronouns (if they actually used no pronouns they wouldn’t say “I”, “me”, “my”, “mine” or “myself” and wouldn’t want others to say “you”, “your”, “yours” and “yourself” to them)! Semantics aside… for these people Three Rings should use the person’s name rather than a pronoun.

Maybe we can get there one day.

Three Rings' "Pronouns" drop-down, with "Dan/Dan/Dan/Dan's/Dan's self" selected. — Three Rings is already capable of supporting people who use no pronouns, but we don’t yet have a user interface to help them specify this! Maybe it’d look like this?

But so long as Three Rings continues to remain ahead of the curve in its respect for and understanding of pronoun use then I’ll be happy.

Our mission is to focus on volunteers and make volunteering easier. At the heart of that mission is treating volunteers with respect. Making sure our system embraces the diversity of the 65,000+ volunteers who use it by using pronouns correctly might be a small part of that, but it’s a part of it, and I for one am glad we make the effort.

Dan Q found GC5MYFN 01 It’s a Bugs Life x2

This checkin to GC5MYFN 01 It's a Bugs Life x2 reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.

Some fellow volunteers and I are on an “away weekend” in the forest; this morning before our first meeting I lead a quick expedition of both established and first-timer geocachers around a few of the local caches.

Passed another couple of ‘cachers on the way from GC840TN, but it sounded like they’d been having less luck than us this morning. Coordinates spot on; dropped me right on top of the cache and I was familiar with this kind of container so I picked it up as soon as I got there – quick and easy find, and our last for the morning! TFTC.

Dan Q found GC840TN Georassic Diplodocus

This checkin to GC840TN Georassic Diplodocus reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.

Some fellow volunteers and I are on an “away weekend” in the forest; this morning before our first meeting I lead a quick expedition of both established and first-timer geocachers around a few of the local caches.

Coordinates didn’t put us very close: perhaps because of tree cover interfering with the GPSr; we needed to decipher the hint. The hint was good, though, and I went straight to the dino’s hiding place, trampled past a few fresh nettles, and retreived it. Excellent caches; we loved these!

Dan Q found GC5MYFW 02 It’s a Bugs Life x2

This checkin to GC5MYFW 02 It's a Bugs Life x2 reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.

Some fellow volunteers and I are on an “away weekend” in the forest; this morning before our first meeting I lead Ga quick expedition of both established and first-timer geocachers around a few of the local caches.

Geoff pounced right onto this one, stunning some of our less-experienced ‘cachers who’d never considered the possibility of a container like this!

Dan Q found GC3JG9P Georassic – Stegosaurus

This checkin to GC3JG9P Georassic - Stegosaurus reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.

Some fellow volunteers and I are on an “away weekend” in the forest; this morning before our first meeting I lead a quick expedition of both established and first-timer geocachers around a few of the local caches.

Our tagalong 5-year-old and 2-year-old co-found this one; they were pretty much an ideal size to get to the GZ. This was the last of the three caches they attended; they went back to their cabin after this but most of the adults carried on.

Dan Q found GC840T0 Georassic Parasaurolophus

This checkin to GC840T0 Georassic Parasaurolophus reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.

Some fellow volunteers and I are on an “away weekend” in the forest; this morning before our first meeting I lead a quick expedition of both established and first-timer geocachers around a few of the local caches.

So THAT is what a Parasaurolophus looks like! Swiftly found by our tame 5 year-old, who was especially delighted to pull a dinosaur out of its hiding place.

Dan Q found GC3JG92 Georassic – Spinosaurus

This checkin to GC3JG92 Georassic - Spinosaurus reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.

Some fellow volunteers and I are on an “away weekend” in the forest; this morning before our first meeting I lead a quick expedition of both established and first-timer geocachers around a few of the local caches.

After a bit of an extended hunt (this dino was well-hidden!) we found this first container; delighted by the theming of this series; FP awarded here for the ones we found.

Note #15151

These three explanations collectively describe quite well what @3RingsCIC and I are doing at @FairlawnsHotel today. 😊

How Do You Move A Bookstore? With A Human Chain, Book By Book

This article is a repost promoting content originally published elsewhere. See more things Dan's reposted.

When October Books, a small radical bookshop in Southampton, England, was moving to a new location down the street, it faced a problem. How could it move its entire stock to the new spot, without spending a lot of money or closing down for long?

The shop came up with a clever solution: They put out a call for volunteers to act as a human conveyor belt.

…

Laurel Wamsley (NPR)

Delightful application of volunteer effort.

The Story of Scgary

Unless they happened to bump into each other at QParty, the first time Ruth and JTA met my school friend Gary was at my dad’s funeral. Gary had seen mention of the death in the local paper and came to the wake. About 30 seconds later, Gary and I were reminiscing, exchanging anecdotes about our misspent youths, when suddenly JTA blurted out: “Oh my God… you’re Sc… Sc-gary?”

Ever since then, my internal monologue has referred to Gary by the new nickname “Scgary”, but to understand why requires a little bit of history…

Despite having been close for over a decade, Gary and I drifted apart somewhat after I moved to Aberystwyth in 1999, especially as I became more and more deeply involved with volunteering at Aberystwyth Nightline and the resulting change in my social circle which soon was 90% comprised of fellow volunteers, (ultimately resulting in JTA’s “What, Everyone?” moment). We still kept in touch, but our once more-intense relationship – which started in a primary school playground! – was put on a backburner as we tackled the next big things in our lives.

Training page from the Aberystwyth Nightline website, circa 2004 — This is what the recruitment page on the Aberystwyth Nightline website looked like *after* I’d improved it. The Web was younger, then.

Something I was always particularly interested both at Nightline and in the helplines I volunteered with subsequently was training. At Nightline, I proposed and pushed forward a reimplementation of their traditional training programme that put a far greater focus on experience and practical skills and less on topical presentations. My experience as a trainee and as a helpline volunteer had given me an appreciation of the fundamentals of listening and I wanted future trainees to be able to benefit from this by giving them less time talking about listening and more time practising listening.

The primary mechanism by which helplines facilitate such practical training is through roleplaying. A trainer will pretend to be a caller and will talk to a trainee, after which the pair (along with any other trainers or trainees who are observing) will debrief and talk about how it went. The only problem with switching wholesale to a roleplay/skills-driven approach to training at Aberystwyth Nightline, as I saw it, was the approach that was historically taken to the generation of roleplay material, which favoured the use of anonymised adaptations of real or imagined calls.

Roleplay scenarios must be realistic (so that they simulate the experience of genuine calls with sufficient accuracy that they are meaningful) but they must also be effective (at promoting the growth of the skills that are needed to best-support callers). Those two criteria often come into conflict in roleplay scenarios: a caller who sits in near-silence for 20 minutes may well be realistic, but there’s a limit to how much you can learn from sitting in silence; a roleplay which tests every facet of a trainee’s practical knowledge provides efficiency, but does not reflect the content of any call that has ever really happened.

I spent some time outlining the characteristics of best-practice roleplays and providing guidelines to help “train the trainers”. These included ideas, some of which were (then) a little radical, like:

A roleplay should be based upon a character, not a story: if the trainer knows how the call is going to end, this constrains the opportunity for the trainee to explore the space and experiment with listening concepts. A roleplay is necessarily improvisational: get into your character, let go of your preconceptions.
Avoid using emotionally-charged experiences from your own life: use your own experience, certainly, but put your own emotional baggage aside. Not only is it unfair to your trainee (they’re not your therapist!) but it can be a can of worms in its own right – I’ve seen a (great) trainee help a trainer to make a personal breakthrough for which they were perhaps not yet ready.
Don’t be afraid to make mistakes: you’re not infallible, and you neither need to be nor to present yourself as a perfect example of a volunteer. Be willing to learn from the trainees (I’ve definitely made use of things I’ve learned from trainees in real calls I’ve taken at Samaritans) and create a space in which you can collectively discuss how roleplays went, rather than simply critiquing them.

In order to demonstrate the concepts I was promoting, I wrote and demonstrated a significant number of sample roleplay ideas, many of which I (or others) would then go on to flesh-out into full roleplays at training sessions. One of these for which I became well-known was entitled My Friend Scott.

The caller in this roleplay presents with suicidal ideation fuelled by feelings of guilt and loneliness following the accidental death, about six months prior, of his best friend Scott, for which he feels responsible. Scott had been the caller’s best friend since childhood, and he’s fixated on the adventures that they’d had together. He clearly has a huge admiration for his dead friend, bordering on infatuation, and blames himself not only for the death but for the resulting fracturing of their shared friendship group and his subsequent isolation.

(We’re close to getting back to the “Scgary story”, I promise. Hang in here.)

When I would perform this roleplay as the caller, I’d routinely flesh out Scott and the caller’s backstory with anecdotes from my own childhood and early-adulthood: it seemed important to be able to fill in these kinds of details in order to demonstrate how important Scott was to the caller’s life. Things that I really did with any of several of my childhood friends found their way, with or without embellishment, into the roleplay, like:

Building a raft on the local duck pond and paddling out to an island, only to have the raft disintegrate and have to swim back
An effort to dye a friend’s hair bright red which didn’t produce a terribly satisfactory result but did stain many parts of a bathroom
Camping in the garden, dragging out a desktop computer and extension cable to fully replicate the “in the wild” experience
Flooding my mother’s garden (which at that time was a long slope on clay soil) in order to make a muddy waterslide
Generating fake credit card numbers to facilitate repeated month-long free trials of an ISP‘s services
Riding on the bonnet of a friend’s first car, hanging on to the windscreen wipers, eventually (unsurprisingly) falling off and getting run over

Of course: none of the new Nightliners I trained knew which, if any, of these stories were real – that was never a part of the experience. But many were real, or had a morsel of truth. And a reasonable number of them – four of those in the list above – were things that Gary and I had done together in our youth.

JTA’s surprise came from that strange feeling that occurs when two very parts of your life that you thought were completely separate suddenly and unexpectedly collide with one another (I’m familiar with it). The anecdote that Gary had just shared about our teen years was one that exactly mirrored something he’d heard me say during the My Friend Scott roleplay, and it briefly crashed his brain. Suddenly, this was Scott standing in front of him, and he’d been able to get far enough through his sentence to begin saying that name (“Sc…”) before the crash stopped him in his tracks and he finished off with “…gary”.

I’m not sure whether or not Gary realises that, in my house at least, he’s to this day been called “Scgary”.

I bumped into him, completely by chance, while visiting my family in Preston this weekend. That reminded me that I’d long planned to tell this story: the story of Scgary, the imaginary person who exists only in the minds of the tiny intersection of people who’ve both (a) met my friend Gary and know about some of the crazy shit we got up to together when we were young and foolish and (b) trained as a volunteer at Aberystwyth Nightline during the window between me overhauling how training was provided and ceasing to be involved with the training programme (as far as I’m aware, nobody is performing My Friend Scott in my absence, but it’s possible…).

Gary asked me to give him a shout and meet up for a beer next time I’m in his neck of the woods, but it only occurred to me after I said goodbye that I’ve no idea what the best way to reach him is, these days. Like many children of the 80s, I’ve still got the landline phone numbers memorised of all of my childhood friends, but even if that number is still valid, it’d be his parents house!

I guess that I’ll let the Internet do the work for me: perhaps if I write this, here, he’ll find it, somehow. Hi, Scgary!

Underground and Overground in the City of London

Despite being only a short journey away (made even shorter by the new railway station that appeared near by house last year), I rarely find myself in London. But once in a while a week comes along when I feel like I’m there all the time.

British Rail branded poster from an abandoned tunnel under Euston Station, circa 1960s. — TODO: funny caption

On Friday of last week, Ruth, JTA and I took one of the London Transport Museum‘s Hidden London tours. Back in 2011 we took a tour of Aldwych Tube Station, probably the most well-known of the London Underground’s disused stations, and it was fantastic, so we were very excited to be returning for another of their events. This time around, we were visiting Euston Station.

Our tour group gathers around the corner from Euston Station. — Stylish hi-vis jackets for everybody!

But wait, you might-well say: Euston station isn’t hidden nor disused! And you’d be right. But Euston’s got a long and convoluted history, and it used to consist of not one but three stations: the mainline station and two independent underground stations run by competing operators. The stations all gradually got connected with tunnels, and then with a whole different set of tunnels as part of the redevelopment in advance of the station’s reopening in 1968. But to this day, there’s still a whole network of tunnels underneath Euston station, inaccessible to the public, that are either disused or else used only as storage, air vents, or cable runs.

Disused lift shaft under Euston Station. — This lift shaft used to transport passengers between what are now the Northern and Victoria lines. Now it’s just a big hole.

A particular highlight was getting to walk through the ventilation shaft that draws all of the hot air out of the Victoria Line platforms. When you stand and wait for your train you don’t tend to think about the network of tunnels that snake around the one you’re in, hidden just beyond the grills in the ceiling or through the doors at the end of the platforms. I shot a video (below) from the shaft, periodically looking down on the trains pulling in and out below us.

No sooner were we back than I was away again. Last Saturday, I made my way back to London to visit Twitter’s UK headquarters in Soho to help the fantastic Code First: Girls team to make some improvements to the way they organise and deliver their Javascript, Python and Ruby curricula. I first came across Code First: Girls through Beverley, one of Three Rings‘ volunteers who happens to work for them, and I’ve become a fan of their work. Unfortunatley my calendar’s too packed to be able to volunteer as one of their instructors (which I totally would if it weren’t for work, and study, and existing volunteering, and things), but I thought this would be a good opportunity to be helpful while I had a nominally-“spare” day.

The coffee lounge on the administration/marketing floor of Twitter's offices in Soho. — Twitter’s offices, by the way, are exactly as beautiful as you’d hope that they might be.

Our host tried to win me over on the merits of working for Twitter (they’re recruiting heavily in the UK, right now), and you know what – if I were inclined towards a commute as far as London (and I didn’t love the work I do so much) – I’d totally give that a go. And not just because I enjoyed telling an iPad what I wanted to drink and then having it dispensed minutes later by a magical automated hot-and-cold-running-drinks tap nearby.

Twitter's reception with its "tweet wall" sculpture. — I’m not sure I ‘get’ the idea of a sculpture of tweets, though. Wouldn’t a “live display” have been more-thematic?

And that’s not even all of it. This coming Thursday, I’m back in London again, this time to meet representatives from a couple of charities who’re looking at rolling out Three Rings. In short: having a direct line to London on my doorstep turns out to be pretty useful.

DevCamp – have we really been doing this for 7 years?

An annual tradition at Three Rings is DevCamp, an event that borrows from the “hackathon” concept and expands it to a week-long code-producing factory for the volunteers of the Three Rings development team. Motivating volunteers is a very different game to motivating paid employees: you can’t offer to pay them more for working harder nor threaten to stop paying them if they don’t work hard enough, so it’s necessary to tap in to whatever it is that drives them to be a volunteer, and help them get more of that out of their volunteering.

Table full of computers at DevCamp 2011. — This photo, from DevCamp 2011, is probably the only instance where I’ve had fewer monitors out than another developer.

At least part of what appeals to all of our developers is a sense of achievement – of producing something that has practical value – as well as of learning new things, applying what they’ve learned, and having a degree of control over the parts of the project they contribute most-directly to. Incidentally, these are the same things that motivate paid developers, too, if a Google search for studies on the subject is to believed. It’s just that employers are rarely able to willing to offer all of those things (and even if they can, you can’t use them to pay your mortgage), so they have to put money on the table too. With my team at Three Rings, I don’t have money to give them, so I have to make up for it with a surplus of those things that developers actually want.

A developer hides inside a handmade camera obscura to watch the solar eclipse at DevCamp 2015. — At the 2015 DevCamp, developers used the solar eclipse as an excuse for an impromptu teambuilding activity: making a camera obscura out of stuff we had lying about.

It seems strange to me in hindsight that for the last seven years I’ve spent a week of my year taking leave from my day job in order to work longer, harder, and unpaid for a voluntary project… but that I haven’t yet blogged about it. Over the same timescale I’ve spent about twice as long at DevCamp than I have, for example, skiing, yet I’ve managed to knock out several blog posts on that subject. Part of that might be borne out of the secretive nature of Three Rings, especially in its early days (when involvement with Three Rings pretty-much fingered you as being a Nightline volunteer, which was frowned upon), but nowadays we’ve got a couple of dozen volunteers with backgrounds in a variety of organisations: and many of those of us that ever were Nightliner volunteers have long since graduated and moved-on to other volunteering work besides.

DevCamp and DocsCamp 2016 volunteers play Betrayal at the House on the Hill — Semi-cooperative horror-themed board games by candlelight are a motivator for everybody, right?

Part of the motivation – one of the perks of being a Three Rings developer – for me at least, is DevCamp itself. Because it’s an opportunity to drop all of my “day job” stuff for a week, go to some beatiful far-flung corner of the country, and (between early-morning geocaching/hiking expeditions and late night drinking tomfoolery) get to spend long days contributing to something awesome. And hanging out with like-minded people while I do so. I like I good hackathon of any variety, but I love me some Three Rings DevCamp!

Geocache GC4EE6C, with accompanying caterpillar and mushroom — The geocaches near DevCamp 2016 were particularly fabulous, though. Like this one – GC4EE6C – part of an Alice In Wonderland-themed series.

So yeah: DevCamp is awesome. It’s more than a little different than those days back in 2003 when I wrote all the code and Kit worked hard at distracting me with facts about the laws of Hawaii – for the majority of DevCamp 2016 we had half a dozen developers plus two documentation writers in attendance! – but it’s still fundamentally about the same thing: producing a piece of software that helps about 25,000 volunteers do amazing things and make the world a better place. We’ve collectively given tens, maybe hundreds of thousands of hours of time in developing and supporting it, but that in turn has helped to streamline the organisation of about 16 million person-hours of other volunteering.

So that’s nice.

Developers marvel at one another's code, etc. — An end-of-day “Show & Tell” session at DevCamp 2016.

Oh, and I was delighted that one of my contributions this DevCamp was that I’ve finally gotten around to expanding the functionality of the “gender” property so that there are now more than three options. That’s almost more-exciting than the geocaches. Almost.

Edit: added a missing word in the sentence about how much time our volunteers had given, making it both more-believable and more-impressive.