What additional structures could be developed to connect volunteers to the movement and what would it take to develop these structures?

Starting thread with this question, which we've been asked to answer.

I believe that in the future a large percentage of volunteers will contribute content not as individual editors, but through educational or cultural institutions. The number of people that can be recruited as individual editors (the more geek demographic) is somewhat limited, and we may already be tapping that resource out. I think that finding a more mature institutional role for real-world educational and cultural groups is an important path to outline.

Responding to the question and building on Pharos response, I think a volunteer database maintained by the Foundation is needed to help recruit volunteers and match them to specific types of volunteer work. I think that people that are familiar with working in traditional volunteer organizations would respond well to recruitment drives that appeal to a specific skill that they have. For example, I think that a semi annual recruitment drive to universities and colleges worldwide for people to assist in copy editing Wikipedia articles would bring in people interested in this type of volunteer work.

There is a proposal here http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Proposal:Volunteer_Toolkit for a Volunteer Toolkit project, which would provide tools for 1) asking for help, 2) developing a welcome page for new people, 3) creating mechanisms for broadcasting volunteer opportunities, 4) providing task and project management tools, 5) supporting on-wiki mentoring, 6) supporting off-wiki processes with conference and meeting scheduling tools and so forth, and 7) managing volunteer relationships. I am not sure that the Movement Task Force is the right place to discuss this proposal -- it seems to me that Movement Roles should confine itself to figuring out who does things (e.g., to increase participation), rather than focusing on what to do (e.g. to increase participation). But the Volunteer Toolkit is engendering lots of discussion at the Community Health task force, if people here are interested in talking about it.

Oh grr, the above comment was me, not logged in. I thought there was a way to edit that, but I can't remember how.

Hi Sue. If you submit when not logged in, you can click the "more" button on the right hand side of your post and that will give you an 'edit' option.

Thanks Bodnotbod. But when I edit the post, it doesn't change my IP to my username, it just annotates the post as "edited by other users." I don't really care that my IP is visible, but now I am intrigued/irked :-)

Reattributing an edit requires either asking a developer to do it, or telling me and having me oversight it, and then re-posting it from the correct username. Neither of those is easy/scalable, but I will oversight at request to protect someone's IP. Luckily, most people just sort of shrug and move on, as Sue did. :)

The problem of sticky signatures has been raised at LiquidThreads Feedback and a solution of sorts appears to be in the offing.

I have made these links before and I'm not sure (in the context of the wiki) whether they will become annoying... I feel a bit like a political canvaser that you see on telly each day: but I'd head to editor awards and rewards and particularly the proposal for "traditional" volunteer recognition which should be the first proposal listed in the proposals section.