My friend is a professional photographer. He was recruited into a volunteer project a few years ago when a major horticultural (园艺的) site was trying to compile a digital photo library of every plant on its property in all four seasons of the year. It’s a massive undertaking that will eventually include thousands of shots. My friend was very interested and signed up, attracted by the importance of the goal and the opportunity to capture many beautiful photographs beyond the ones required.
From the beginning it was evident that this project was not integrated into an overall volunteer engagement plan. The staff member assigning the work is part of the team overseeing the gardens, with very little experience in dealing with volunteers of any type, let alone those donating their professional skills. The problem begins there.
While the purpose of this project is to get excellent photographs for the digital library, there is another important component of the task that is gradually weakening the volunteers’ enthusiasm. The horticulturists tag each new plant with a documenting label recording its Latin and English names, basic data, and the date of planting, and the photographers must take a picture of each tag to accompany the shots of the plants. This is a reasonable request and easy to do.
However, in addition to transmitting the photos taken on any day on site, the photographers have been asked to upload their pictures accompanied by a data form that needs to be completed separately. This requires the volunteers to sit at a computer and copy information from the photo to the form. As you can imagine, the tags are not always easy to read or were not completely filled in by the gardener in the first place. Yet the volunteers are expected to complete the missing areas, even though their expertise is photography, not horticulture.
My friend remembers one conversation that went like this. Supervisor: “You neglected to include whether this plant is deciduous (落叶的) or not.” Friend: “I don’t know how to tell and the information was not on the label.” Supervisor: “If it has leaves, it’s deciduous.” Friend: “How would I know that in a winter shot?”
Over time, all of the photographers have become less and less interested in visiting the property and later and later in submitting their work. Their pleasure in doing what they promised—taking the photographs—has diminished as they spend almost the same amount of hours at home entering data, which they really dislike, sending their passion for the job, productivity, and valuable expertise down the drain.
What it takes to solve this problem is a volunteer involvement mindset (心态). How can the organization get the most pictures from talented photographers and also accomplish the cataloguing requirements equally necessary for the project? Recruit some non-photographer volunteers who like to work with data and who can complete the data forms for any and all photographers taking the pictures. This will result in more photographs and more complete data—and make both sets of volunteers feel useful and pleased.
1. What does the underlined phrase “a massive undertaking” in Paragraph 1 most probably mean?
2. Why is the author’s friend attracted by the project?
3. What does the conversation in Paragraph 5 imply?
4. Why do the photographers lose interest in the project?
5. What does the last paragraph mainly discuss?
