Forum Moderators: open
They will not get payed
/Ove
shabir, not specific to ODP, but volunteer time and energy spent gives the opportunity to touch, and sometimes signicantly impact, the lives of people. It's a way to make a contribution that can be more satisfying and enriching to a person's life than monetary rewards could ever be.
It has become a fantastic directory with a community of thousands who dedicate hundreds of hours.
Although I havent read the contractual blah blah behind it, the Dmoz project would struggle to introduce a commercial agenda or any revenue stream without incurring a crippling class action law suite from the thousands of volunteers who helped build it!
AOL burnt themselves with their community project where they were sued by volunteer contributors. Probably explains AOL's slow adoption of integrating Dmoz listings in their site searches.
A class-action suit on what grounds?
As for the volunteers who helped build it, they stuck around when the founders of Newhoo (as the ODP was known then) sold the directory to Netscape in 1998. At the time, I remember thinking the volunteer editors would feel betrayed and desert en masse, but apparently most stuck around. At any rate, the ODP is still attracting volunteer editors, even though it's now owned by AOL Time Warner. (That's kind of weird when you think about it--can you imagine open-source programmers sticking with Linux if Linus Torvalds owned the code and sold Linux to Microsoft?)
From Internet News
[internetnews.com]
"The suit alleges that Brian Williams and Kelly Hallisey, along with an estimated 10,000 AOL volunteers, should have been paid for their work in AOL's forums, chat rooms, and bulletin boards.
Damages have not yet be set, but Leon Greenberg, attorney for the volunteers, estimates that AOL could owe as much as $20 million in back wages. While his clients and other members of the class voluntarily gave their time to AOL, Greenberg says federal labor law doesn't allow such generosity to a for-profit business.
"AOL isn't a charity. If it were, these people would have no claim. But AOL does business to make money and therefore they're covered by law."
Williams said the commercialization of AOL was in part what drove him and Hallisey to file the suit. According to Williams, he became disillusioned when AOL started turning its community forums into revenue generators.
"It increasing became like AOL was just trying to make a dollar off the back of free slave labor. Before, you didn't have advertising everywhere, and it was a much richer community where people got together to get together, and now it's not like that."
Two other articles which are dated:
Former AOL volunteers file labor suit
[zdnet.com]
Volunteer rebels rock Web community
[news.cnet.com]
Anyone know what the outcome of this was?
I have tried even in categories where I have no business interest, I just don't like seeing the " this category needs an editor " bit at the bottom, the ODP has a huge amount of editors but obviously need more.
I think it would be advantageous to everyone including the existing editors, if they made it a bit easier to get accepted.
One other comment :
I presume they want people who know a good website when they see it ( normally a person involved in the internet business ). BUT you have to recommend 2 sites in that category and they ask you about your business affiliations which will obviously be one of the sites you recommend, I have done this and been rejected but at least I was honest about my business affiliations !
To round up I just think they need more editors and have to relax a bit with the rejections. :)
Sorry I'm having a bad day and I have been rejected for an editors position 4 times in the last 6 weeks.
any comments
by the way :
MERRY XMAS :)
Not necessarily. They want people who can describe what's available on a site, not rate the quality of its navigation system.
>>BUT you have to recommend 2 sites in that category<<
Three sites, I think.
>> and they ask you about your business affiliations which will obviously be one of the sites you recommend<<
Well, there's your mistake.
Want to get accepted?
1. pick a topical category. Nothing in Business, Shopping, or Computers
2. pick a leaf category. If the category you're applying to has subcats you're very unlikely to be accepted to it as a new editor
3. take the application seriously. Fill out every field, spell check your work, pick sites that are absolutely appropriate to the category and describe what is on the sites - don't review them
4. exclamation points are bad. So are: best, great, and more, lots, etc., you, click, enter, find, buy, and almost all abreviations and acronyms
5. try applying for a letter cat without a listed editor in [dmoz.org...] It's dirty work, but someone's got to do it
