# Volunteering Guide 1. Keep in contact with your coordinator or manager throughout the year. They should know how to get ahold of you in case they need help. 2. Tell your friends that you're volunteering in case they want to join but didn't know that you volunteered. It's far easier to be a volunteer if your friend asks you to. 3. Read the schedule, map, and [policies](http://sakuracon.org/about-us/policies/) so that when people ask you questions (because you have a staff badge on) you can answer them. 4. Vote every year in the elections. [Elections](/Elections-2017) always occur the meeting after Sakuracon, so you can easily put it on your calendar. 2017's elections will be on May 7, 2017. 5. Consider running for director once you have the appropriate [qualifications](/Volunteering-Guide#qualifications). 6. Gossip with your fellow volunteers all you want, but please don't talk badly behind someone's back. If you have a complaint that isn't requested from someone, please direct it at the person who it is about as soon as possible. Airing greivances when a person is running for director is immature and counterproductive. While you may lack courage or feel that it's tactful to keep your peace, if you have constructive criticism, you can help others help you. 7. "Hurry up and wait" is a common problem in Sakura-Con (IT is awesome at this). It is usually caused by the problem that managers can't guess who is going to be absent from an important activity (such as setting up Registration) so they will ask more people than they and their assistant can manage to work. This cannot be solved but can be managed and improved by communicating if you are going to miss an important activity. When you feel that you're in a "hurry up and wait", it might be a good opportunity to meet your coworkers, network for job improvements (if you're not networking with people, at least know what they do for a living), and learning important jobs from others. Another problem that causes this phenomenon is that teardown has to occur after a department has finished using their gear. Therefore, no work can be done until the department has finished. This means you have to wait for hours while others finish their work. 8. Many tasks require inside knowledge about systems that are not obvious to an outsider. This is tribal knowledge and should be written down and communicated when working with new people. If you don't know how something works, ask the veteran. How do you know who a veteran is? Ask someone how many years they have been volunteering. Excellent icebreaker. 9. If you are a manager, it's your job to promote cohesion among your volunteers. Communicate with them in the manner that suits them best: phone, text, IM, e-mail, Facebook, mailing list, whatever they need to help them. If you don't know what communication method works for your volunteers or if you aren't getting a response, try asking someone. 10. If you're communicating with someone from another department, make sure that your manager or director knows. You don't necessarily need to CC every e-mail you send, but the first e-mail should definitely be CC'ed your immediate superior because it's their job to interface unless it's your specific job to communicate with them. 11. Learn the [policies](http://sakuracon.org/about-us/policies/) over time, don't try to read it all at once. Ask someone if you don't understand. 12. Don't work more than a reasonable shift. Your obligation to the con is approximately 4 hours per day during the convention. Volunteers will often work longer shifts to help and fill gaps. This is okay, so long as you take it easy. Remember that you should relax so that you are able to sustain the stress of three long days of anime and fun. 13. As a manager, don't ask coordinators to share their rooms with people they don't know. If you don't know how to house all your volunteers near the convention space, ask a veteran. Often there are better solutions than one manager can come up with. 14. If you are an otaku and don't get out much, a good rule of thumb is to listen as much as you talk. If that isn't working, try introducing yourself. ## Qualifications To become a director, you need to know how your department works and how Sakura-Con works. While other directors that have 1 year left on their term will help you and the managers that you rehire (assuming you rehire managers from the previous year) will be essential to managing the department, you will be expected to be more capable than the other candidates. Sakura-Con is a 501.3(c) non-profit, so you need to research what a conflict of interest is and how you can avoid it. To be a director or a board member, you need to have excellent etiquitte since you will be often held to a higher standard than any other volunteer. To be a director or a manager of a busy group, your day job has to be extremely flexible about time off and free time. Locality is not a problem for hundreds of volunteers who travel from around the country to Sakura-Con. Even some directors have lived in Japan while being a Sakura-Con director. However, to be a director, to paraphrase John Utz's comment at elections 2016, you need to either already have been a director before or you need to be local. A director needs to know the [bylaws](http://sakuracon.org/about-us/bylaws/) thoroughly and the [policies](http://sakuracon.org/about-us/policies/) backwards and forwards.