[Gllug] Voluntary work

[Bruce Richardson]

On Tue, Nov 11, 2003 at 04:06:01PM -0000, Andy wrote:
> Craig,
>   My experience with this is that a Charity is a business just like any
> other.  Most businesses don't like their Infrastructure maintained by
> volunteer staff as they have a tendency be "Here today gone tomorrow".

I would back that up.  I work in the IT department of a fairly large
voluntary organisation and every so often somebody tries to push a
voluteer at us.  We always turn them down.  If we had any work we could
trust to a volunteer it would be so trivial that nobody worthwhile would
want to do it.  There's also the issue of security.  And the minor issue
that the people who push volunteers at us are usually the kind of jerks
who think they're good at IT because they can make a real mess of an
Access database and would like us to make them look as if they have
influence.

Apart from the problems of security and accountability (an employee who
messes up can be disciplined but a volunteer can simply walk away and
leave you facing the legal or financial cost) and the simple fact that
most charitable organisations don't use volunteers for skilled work,
there's the problem that volunteers require much more work to manage
than salaried staff.  People who manage volunteers find that it takes up
most of their time and very few IT managers have that luxury.

> you have to prove you will "be here tomorrow to" by volunteering for
> them for several years.  Once you have done this, you will be allowed
> to work on things like this.

I sincerely doubt it.  Not unless the organisation is so small that it
doesn't have a proper IT department, in which case the work still won't
be much to talk about but might just be the very bottom rung on the job
ladder, if you're lucky.

-- 
Bruce

I unfortunately do not know how to turn cheese into gold.
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