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The bill not only gives cable companies and wireless providers free rein to do what they like with your browsing history, shopping habits, your location and other information gleaned from your online activity, but it would also prevent the Federal Communications Commission from ever again establishing similar consumer privacy protections.

When you make a voice call on your smartphone, the information is protected: Your phone company can’t sell the fact that you are calling car dealerships to others who want to sell you a car. But if the same device and the same network are used to contact car dealers through the internet, that information — the same information, in fact — can be captured and sold by the network. To add insult to injury, you pay the network a monthly fee for the privilege of having your information sold to the highest bidder.

“online communities” – the thousands of discussion forums allowing like-minded people to find one another, keep in touch, and share information. Most often these online communities are started by one or two highly motivated and unpaid individuals (aided by the amazing availability of free platforms to host such groups), and participation by all subscribers is intentional and voluntary. They operate on the principle of exchange, since if everyone lurks and never posts, no helpful ideas can emerge.

I asked them about how they worked with online volunteers and at first they said they didn’t have any.  Naturally, I soon changed their perception. In fact, NTEN depends on the freely donated time and skills of its involved members.

Why is it important to recognize this quasi-invisible workforce? Because seeing and valuing the volunteer nature of this service will let you appreciate and strengthen it. Further, it’s possible to apply the principles of volunteer management to make such volunteer participation easier and more productive. For example:

Date: August 21, 2017Author: tmiket 3 Comments If you know me, at some point you’ve heard me talk about working smarter instead of harder. In all the years I’ve been talking about that I’ve never had anyone disagree. Yet, far too often when the conversation progresses to exploring new ways of working I hit the “I don’t have time for that.” objection. Or “We can’t do that here.” Or “I would love to do that but our people would never go for that.” Or a bunch of others that you’ve probably heard yourself. Don’t fall into that trap if you want to be a valued contributor to your organization. To steal a term from Jane Bozarth, be a “Positive Deviant”. “While there are individual positive deviants who work alone, a key factor is working with the community to surface, spread, and sustain solutions rather than try to force outside-in answers—as is so often the case with training. … Leveraging social tools and workplace communities, and encouraging people to show their work, can help to surface and spread solutions and to sustain application of new learning to the workplace” Anyone, anwhere can surface, spread, and sustain learning in the workplace.