Operations Coordinator – Volunteer
Operations Team
About Translation Commons
Translation Commons is a nonprofit public charity dedicated to providing a reliable and scalable method for digitally rendering languages. Our mission is to solve the problem of unrepresented languages struggling to participate in a global communications network, and since 2015, we have successfully helped digitize numerous endangered languages.
Position Description
Translation Commons is looking for a Operations Coordinator to help stand up lightweight project/program management and develop our internal Google Sites intranet. You’ll begin by supporting the Operations Team with clear project tracking and centralized documentation — then extend shared practices to other teams to eliminate silos, improve collaboration, and ensure knowledge continuity across a global volunteer network.
Key Responsibilities
- Stand up and maintain project trackers to clarify priorities, task ownership, status, and deadlines across teams.
- Attend weekly Operations meetings to surface new needs, dependencies, and blockers.
- Coordinate cross-team efforts and communicate expectations clearly between leads and contributors.
- Develop simple dashboards or views to track progress and key performance indicators.
- Train, coach, and encourage leaders and volunteers to update project trackers regularly.
- Build and maintain a single source of truth for documentation through the Google Sites intranet and Google Drive.
- Upload, organize, and maintain resources: process guides, FAQs, toolkits, training materials, best practices, team references, and more.
- Establish version control and archiving practices to keep content accurate and current.
- Help document decisions, action items, and status changes to support continuity when volunteer roles shift.
- Organize intranet structure, navigation, and taxonomy to be intuitive and scalable for new contributors.
- Identify content gaps and collaborate with team leads to fill them.
- Run brief orientation or training sessions (or provide materials) to help volunteers use the intranet effectively.
- Monitor usage trends and gather user feedback to recommend improvements.
- Partner with other teams to encourage content contribution.
- Design systems that support:
- High volunteer turnover
- Varying levels of Google Workspace proficiency
- Asynchronous collaboration
- Shifting task ownership and onboarding needs
- Promote engagement through lightweight, volunteer-friendly practices.
Project & Program Coordination
Knowledge Management & Documentation
Intranet Design & Adoption
Ease of Use & Accessibility
Desired Skills and Experience
- Strong project management and organizational skills.
- Excellent written and verbal communication, especially for asynchronous collaboration.
- Proficiency with Google Workspace (Docs, Sheets, Slides, Forms, Drive, Sites…).
- Ability to teach, coach, and encourage adoption of new tools and workflows.
- Experience managing remote, asynchronous, volunteer-based teams is highly preferred.
- Skilled at listening to understand needs and building simple, intuitive solutions.
- Self-starter who can work independently while collaborating across teams.
- Demonstrated ability to overcome resistance and guide others through change.
- Familiarity with intranet design or knowledge management systems is highly preferred.
- Experience managing remote or volunteer-based work is a plus.
- Familiarity with project management or change-management frameworks is a plus.
- Weekly commitment of at least 5 hours a week.
