Sometimes volunteering is a waste of your time. You contact a volunteer coordinator. She refers you to somebody else. The second person doesn't return your phone calls. You finally arrange a time to work, but when you show up there is nothing for you to do.

Other times volunteering can transform your life. There is no joy like moving the world even slightly toward a better place.

Making good use of volunteers is very hard.

The skills and interests of the volunteer don't always match the needs of the organization. Lots of our volunteers want to get real world experience doing hands-on network stuff. There is some of that work available but more often we need people to sit in a lab and answer "dumb" questions from people. Generally we tend to trust people who do the simple stuff and ask them to help with the more complicated stuff.

All the people coordinating volunteers for our member organizations have other unrelated work that consumes at least 40 hours per week. This is not an ideal situation. All our member organizations need more good volunteers. We are working hard to find a volunteer coordinator for the consortium, but for now, you are more likely to be successful as a volunteer if you are persistent.