Recently the Sunlight Foundation asked members of the public to help uncover which members of Congress employed spouses on their campaign committees. Just two days later, Sunlight’s Bill Allison reported that this “distributed research project” was done:

Incredible!—in less than two days, a virtual investigative team dug through campaign finance records for 435 current members of Congress, trying to find out if they paid their spouses from campaign funds. There were 24 of us (myself included—I looked up six members) who left our names, and 83 members investigated by anonymous researchers… Of those who did leave their names, our huge thanks go out to KCinDC who investigated 155 House members, Beezling who looked into 116, VaAntirepublican who did 24.

What’s really interesting to me is not how quickly this assignment was completed, but the fact that just a few people completed more than 70 percent of the work.

If we convert the number of members researched by each participant to a percentage, here’s what it looks like: KCinDC completed 36% of the research. Beezling finished off 27%. Together KCinDC and Beezling did 63% of the work. The top five contributors —KCinDC, Beezling, VaAntirepublican, Cosmo, and Rybesh—get credit for 72%. If 107 people participated, that means five percent of participants completed almost three quarters of the work.

That fits what we know from other online projects. In “What is the 1% rule?” Charles Arthur writes:

“It’s an emerging rule of thumb that suggests that if you get a group of 100 people online then one will create content, 10 will “interact” with it (commenting or offering improvements) and the other 89 will just view it.”

Arthur provided metrics from other sites where the community is responsible for creating the content. Like Wikipedia, where “50% of all article edits are done by 0.7% of users, and more than 70% of all articles have been written by just 1.8% of all users, according to the Church of the Customer blog.”

A week ago, user experience expert Jakob Nielson posted about the same topic— “participation inequality.” According to Nielson:

“User participation often more or less follows a 90-9-1 rule: 90% of users are lurkers (i.e., read or observe, but don’t contribute); 9% of users contribute from time to time, but other priorities dominate their time; 1% of users participate a lot and account for most contributions: it can seem as if they don’t have lives because they often post just minutes after whatever event they’re commenting on occurs.”

The volunteer rates described by Bill, Charles, and Jakob match my experiences organizing volunteers for the Dean and Kerry campaigns. While on the Kerry-Edwards campaign, I created and managed the MediaCorps program. Its purpose was to organize people to write letters to the editor, call in to radio programs, monitor the media, etc. By the end of the campaign more than 50,000 people had joined MediaCorps (but not all of them were active members.) This accounted for just .0145 percent of those who had signed up for email alerts from the campaign. Perhaps even more striking is that a small percentage of MediaCorps members accounted for the majority of our output. A rough estimate would be that 5 percent of the list was responsible for most of what we got done.

On campaigns people like KCinDC and Beezling are called “supervolunteers.” Supervolunteers don’t just give a lot of time and effort. They also become leaders who inspire others to pitch in. Investing in them—giving them the resources they need, making it possible for them to learn new skills, and managing the volunteer effort wisely so that none of their time is wasted—makes a big difference in the long-run. So for me the numbers above are just half of the story.