Facetious? Illustration? Of what? I thought I had a sense of humor, but, alas, you've proven me wrong. Ellen At 01:43 PM 12/18/2002 -0500, you wrote: >Ellen and all, > >No offence was intended by my sarcastic and facetious response to this >thread. <snip>

We all need to remind ourselves that we are a 'volunteer' organization. Having been involved with other volunteer organizations as both a volunteer and as a paid advisor, I know that you cannot supervise volunteers in the same way that you would supervise paid employees. Volunteers are very special people who are freely donating their time and resources to help others, no matter what organization they are involved in. As volunteers, we need to know that we are appreciated and that we can make mistakes without being afraid of someone yelling at us or telling us that we should 'know better'. We should be able to know that we have some flexibility in how we do our volunteer work. Anyone that supervises other volunteers needs to provide that flexibility to those volunteers. Let them know that they can ask for help at any time without fear of being belittled for not knowing the answer. Throw in a little fun along the way. That last is probably the most important part. If volunteering isn't enjoyable, then there's no sense in volunteering your time doing anything. Having a web server go down suddenly happens all the time on the web. If it's a case of equipment failure through no fault of the volunteer, then we need to work around that by putting up a message letting people know that there's a problem and offering temporary space elsewhere if it's needed. On the other hand, if a web server disappears altogether, then I feel we should assist in any way that we can in order to get the county site going again on another server. (don't forget to remind everyone to back up their files often.) That's my two-cents worth....... Connie