AOL Community Leader Program

The AOL Community Leader Program or AOL CLP was the official name for the large group of America Online online service volunteers who moderated chat rooms, message boards, and download libraries.

The program's roots dated back to the use of online remote volunteer "guides" by AOL predecessor QuantumLink at its start in 1985. The system which became AOL established the Community Leader Program officially in the early 1990s, and discontinued it in 2005. At the peak of the program, it is estimated that AOL had approximately 14,000 volunteers, including 350 non-adult teenagers.

Community Leaders had a wide variety of responsibilities, ranging from hosting chat rooms, monitoring message boards and file libraries, providing customer service, teaching online classes, and particularly creating and managing forum content. However, toward the end of the program, Community Leader duties were generally restricted to monitoring chat and message boards. In exchange for their services, AOL provided free service to their volunteers. Community Leaders also received special accounts (Price Index 77 or Overhead Accounts) that allowed them to restrict disruptive chat, hide inappropriate message board postings, and access private areas on the AOL service, such as the Community Leader Headquarters (CLHQ).

Although at times controversial, the Community Leader program arguably played a substantial role in the rapid growth and success of the America Online service in the mid-1990s. Because they were usually recruited from the more active users of a particular online forum, Community Leaders were often very passionate about the area for which they volunteered their time. This enthusiasm usually resulted in a greater sense of community and a higher level of professionalism in that forum. This in turn gave the AOL service more value over the less organized "frontier" of the Internet, at least in the eyes of users new to the online scene at the time. It also provided oversight with respect to forum content by knowledgeable individuals.

In May 1999, Kelly Hallisey and Brian Williams, two former Community Leaders, filed a class action lawsuit against AOL, claiming that AOL volunteers performed work equivalent to employees and thus should be compensated according to the Fair Labor Standards Act. The plaintiffs argued that the Community Leader position required a significant amount of effort and detail to qualify the position as having an "employee relationship" with AOL. The plaintiffs specifically demonstrated how Community Leaders had to undergo a thorough, 3-month training program and were required to file timecards for shifts, work at least four hours per week, and submit detailed reports outlining their work activity during each shift. When AOL first started the program it charged for access to its services by the hour, thus Community Leaders, i.e. those who were heavy Internet users saved hundreds of dollars each month. This fact actually hurt AOL when the lawsuit began, however, as the reception of benefits (along with whether the work is full-time and displaces regular employees) is a factor that helps the Department of Labor determine if a volunteer should actually be paid. The U.S. Department of Labor investigated the report, but came to no conclusions, officially closing the investigation in 2001. In response to the investigation, AOL began drastically reducing volunteer responsibilities. By 2000, nearly all Community Leaders had lost content-editing rights and no longer provided customer service or technical support to AOL customers. Additionally, in many AOL forums, Community Leader supervisors became more lax about paperwork and shift hours.

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