Lessons learned from the Community Discussion on Burnout

Thu, 26 Sep 2019 00:00:00 +0000

How do you sustain a community of volunteers? “Burnout” has been the subject of recent attention in widely-shared articles such as How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation. But what can we do as individuals and members of a volunteer-based community to prevent - and mitigate the effects of - burnout? Stuart Geiger, staff ethnographer at the UC Berkeley Institute for Data Science, and Dorothy Howard, PhD student at the UC San Diego Department of Communication, are studying burnout in the context of the visible/invisible work of open-source software sustainability and maintenance, as part of a research project funded by the Sloan and Ford Foundations. They recently led a very popular Carpentries community discussion, using their preliminary research findings as a starting point for further discussion about burnout in the Carpentries context. The conversation was broadly applicable - and pertained to volunteer work, day jobs, and hobbies, all in pursuit of that lofty goal of “work-life balance.”

Diya Das on The Carpentries

Lessons learned from the Community Discussion on Burnout