Labour of Love: Volunteer Perceptions on Building Relatedness in Online Volunteering Communities

Volunteerism in the digital age offers many new possibilities and avenues for public participation. In this paper, we discuss volunteering as a form of work and how certain experiential aspects of HCI systems supporting the volunteers’ unpaid labour are instrumental in volunteer wellbeing. The sense of feeling close to others and experiencing relatedness is an important factor that can predict engagement and wellbeing of volunteers. Relatedness can be achieved in many ways, for instance, through expressing and receiving gratitude. Through four co-design workshops with n=9 participants, we identified seven perceptions of volunteers regarding their relatedness experiences. This was achieved via a case study of an online teleconferencing platform where volunteers help train and assess medical students for their medical communication skills. Findings are further discussed to inform future design to support adequate level of formalness and emotional labour in online volunteering communities.