How to encourage users of an online community to volunteer and help grow the community?
People become volunteers in some activities if performing the activities brings them pleasure in itself. The more fun it is to perform an activity, the more of it users will do. On one the way to reward the users for doing something in an online community is to allocate the activity an activity into a dedicated official role with a special social status. It also establishes a special social contract between you and the volunteers in a given role about what is expected from both parties. It also helps to automate managing access of the necessary rights and tools. The more different dedicated roles you have in your community, the more users will take the opportunity to help you grow your community. In a perfect world each critical volunteering activity in your community has its own dedicated role.
An example of a dedicated role in a community is the role of moderator.
This is a fragment of a draft of the book “Lessons Learned While Working On Stack Overflow”. Read the full book on kindle or the paperback version.