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Infrastructures for Virtual Volunteering at Online Music Festivals

Benford, Steve; Manninen, Kadja; Martindale, Sarah; Hazzard, Adrian; Martinez Avila, Juan Pablo; Tennent, Paul; Spence, Jocelyn; Castle-Green, Teresa; Brundell, Pat; Barnard, Pepita; Darzentas, Dimitrios Paris

Authors

Steve Benford

Kadja Manninen

Sarah Martindale

Adrian Hazzard

Juan Pablo Martinez Avila

Paul Tennent

Jocelyn Spence

Teresa Castle-Green

Pat Brundell

Pepita Barnard



Abstract

Volunteering benefits recipients, volunteers, communities, and society, while digital technologies establish new opportunities for virtual volunteering. We describe how volunteers transitioned the UK's long-established Oxjam grassroots music festival online in response to the COVID pandemic, delivering a local pilot before scaling up nationwide. We adopt an infrastructural perspective to reveal how two teams of volunteers defined a flexible festival format, knitted together diverse technologies into a technical platform, and operated this to deliver the festival. We highlight the need for teams of volunteers to orchestrate both audience and performer trajectories through festivals. We argue for deliberately designing in volunteer labour rather than automating it out by translating traditional roles online while defining new digital ones. We propose to make these roles rewarding through a more social volunteer experience, including privileged backstage access. We highlight the challenges of using social media for such events, including complying with algorithmic policing of rights.

Citation

Benford, S., Manninen, K., Martindale, S., Hazzard, A., Martinez Avila, J. P., Tennent, P., Spence, J., Castle-Green, T., Brundell, P., Barnard, P., & Darzentas, D. P. (2023). Infrastructures for Virtual Volunteering at Online Music Festivals. Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, 7(CSCW1), Article 65. https://doi.org/10.1145/3579498

Journal Article Type Article
Online Publication Date Apr 16, 2023
Publication Date 2023-04
Deposit Date Apr 24, 2023
Publicly Available Date Apr 24, 2023
Journal Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction
Print ISSN 2573-0142
Publisher Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)
Peer Reviewed Peer Reviewed
Volume 7
Issue CSCW1
Article Number 65
DOI https://doi.org/10.1145/3579498
Keywords Volunteering, Music Festivals, Virtual Volunteering, Orchestration, Communities, Copyright, Performing Rights, Audience, Performers, Trajectories, COVID-19 Pandemic

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