J. Schönböck, M. Raab, J. Altmann, E. Kapsammer, A. Kusel, B. Pröll, W. Retschitzegger, W. Schwinger – A Survey on Volunteer Management Systems – Proceedings of 49th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS-49), Hawaii, Vereinigte Staaten von Amerika, 2016, pp. 767-776
Abstract
Voluntary work is indispensable in nearly every area of today’s society, e.g., service activities in health care or emergencies. Not least because of this omnipresence of volunteering, already a plethora of volunteer management systems (VMS) has emerged, trying to support diverse volunteering processes and to deal with the broad spectrum and peculiarities of voluntary work. Thus, an in-depth understanding of functional commonalities and differences of VMS is urgently needed. The goal of this paper is therefore to provide an in-depth survey of existing VMS. For this, first, an initial attempt towards a reference model (RM) for VMS is presented, capturing their basic functional ingredients and interrelationships in terms of UML class diagrams. Second, the RM is operationalized by means of a set of evaluation criteria used to compare seven carefully selected VMS, thereby discussing their peculiarities and shortcomings. Third, lessons learned are provided together with research directions for future VMS.