Official Volunteer Persona

For some official volunteer projects, such as usability testing, a persona won't be necessary. But for online projects that are signed by the author or commentator (such as the blog projects in the list of example positions), you will want to develop a persona as part of your application. If you are re-applying, you can submit a new persona if you no longer wish to continue the old persona.

In most cases, your persona will only be a pseudonym. However, your proposed project could involve a personality as part of your person, for example if you wanted to use a caricatured approach to writing an article or responding to comments.

Choosing a Pseudonym

Your pseudonym should generally follow in the spirit of the trading families in Ludopolis.

If one of your reasons for volunteering is to gain some publicity, then you may want to use your real name or business name. However, unless the name already sounds like it is from the land of Ludo, then you will want to fluff it up somehow. "John Doe" could become "John Doe-Nadeault" or "John Doe of Winth."

The names "Marslow" or "Brinkthorpe" are reserved for full-time staff.

More than a pseudonym

For some projects involving writing, you may wish to develop a personality to go with your pseudonym. For example:

• an enthusiastic professorial writing style for an article-writing project
• a calm peace-keeping approach for a blog comment moderation project

Multiple personas

In most cases, you may want a single persona that you can use as a pseudonym. However, your proposal might take an alternate approach to developing personas:

• you might use multiple personas in one project
• you might develop personas that can be used by multiple authors