IT Volunteering with Missions
From MissionTechWiki
Volunteers can be a problem for missions
Volunteers are not employees, you can't easily fire them, they aren't always available, and it is hard to discipline them when they go off the rails. For IT support, this is a problem. Many organisations that have used IT volunteers have problems with each volunteer wanting to do things their way, then leaving, and leaving an unsupportable mess. Or everything is fine, until there is a problem, then the volunteer is away, or busy at work and it takes days or weeks to fix a problem.
So many organisations, especially any of size, have their own IT people, or have outsourced it. IT is too critical.
Finding organisations to help/opportunities=
A couple of ways to find ones:
- Contact http://www.Lightsys.org who travel the US around doing Mission IT support, or http://www.crosscape.com.au in Australia.
- A couple of mission sites that list opportunities are http://www.missionfinder.org/ and http://www.finishers.org/ who specialise in folks looking for a nth career in misisons.
- http://www.techmission.org, who tend to setup community computing centres, have setup http://www.christianvolunteering.org, which may have opportunities
One way to work around some of those volunteering issues above is for a group of IT folk to work with one organisation. That helps spread the load, increase the resources etc, but complicates the management a bit. The SLTy groups for http://www.ICTA.net can work this way, starting with understanding God's purpose for IT and then working as a team to help an organisation.
Another way to get around those issues is to help an organisation who has a full-time (ish) IT person and help them, perhaps on projects. Or maybe help form an IT steering committee for a mission.