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By Janelle Brown

April 16, 1999 |At Observers.net, a revolution is brewing. Observers has become the online home for unhappy former America Online volunteers and employees, a place where hundreds of displaced AOL insiders both gripe and maintain longstanding friendships. The boards are an education in acronyms, as former "community leaders" -- the volunteers who spend their free time maintaining the boards, chat rooms and community areas of AOL -- compare notes and toss around arcane terms like TOS, IM, ACI, SRT and the CLO.

Observers.net's bustle is a testimony to the strength of the connections that members had made inside the AOL system. As "Moozie," one of the site's founders, explains, "An esprit de corps has arisen over the years -- there's a whole community of volunteers, a network of people who have been friends for a long time." Observers.net is also, however, leading the charge against the program that forged those friendships in the first place: A group of former community leaders and Observers.net members has asked the U.S. Department of Labor to investigate AOL's volunteer system for possible labor law violations. The question at stake: Are the volunteers, in fact, slaving away as unpaid community employees?

It's a subject that hits home for almost all online communities. Online community companies, from GeoCities to iVillage, are supported by volunteers who spend their free time maintaining the communities they love. But, paradoxically, the companies are also profiting from the work those volunteers put into the communities. Under the Fair Labor Standards Act, does that mean that the volunteers should be reimbursed for their efforts?

"Clarifying the relationship is going to be key: Is maintaining a community 'labor,' or is it, in fact, part of why people become customers and something that they enjoy?" asks Gail Williams, executive director of the online community the Well, which helped pioneer the volunteer model (and which Salon acquired last week). "It's way too early to know what will happen -- but I do know everyone will be watching and paying attention."

More than 10,000 volunteers currently serve time in the community leader program of America Online. These volunteers spend four hours a week, often far more, in a wide variety of roles: monitoring chat rooms, hosting bulletin board discussions, helping kids with homework, offering technical advice. In return, the volunteers get a free America Online account and access to special community leader forums.

Hosts have to go through an extensive training program, in which they are instructed in the ways of the ubiquitous TOS (or "Terms of Service" agreement). All volunteers are roughly grouped under the term "community leader," but they take on varied roles and titles: There are, for example, hosts, guides, rangers, librarians, forum managers and team leaders, not to mention instructors and administrative coordinators. Volunteers help run and manage the program, train new volunteers and maintain administrative paperwork. Coordinating the whole system is ACI, an AOL subsidiary whose sole function seems to be to run the community leader program. It's a confusing tangle of hierarchies and acronyms that only a dedicated AOL follower can understand.

Former volunteers have a range of complaints about the volunteer program, most of which involve the feeling that they were mistreated by AOL. Some complain about having been summarily removed from AOL when they criticized the system; others protest that they were forced to follow draconian rules and non-disclosure agreements. Explains Kelly Hallissey, a mother of four and former AOL community leader who calls herself the "ringleader" of the Observers.net community, "How AOL treats their volunteers is not how you treat volunteers: You can't shove a gazillion rules down their throat, then yell at them and fire them when they disagree."

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