The article mentions this, but it certainly bears repeating - the best kind of volunteers are the ones who have developed their 10,000 hours of expertise in the

The article mentions this, but it certainly bears repeating - the best kind of volunteers are the ones who have developed their 10,000 hours of expertise in their profession, and then volunteer their time. Back in 1998, a small group of us volunteers took the Red Cross in Palo Alto and wired it up for Ethernet Networking in a single weekend. I'd had about 6 years of pretty intensive IT training, so was able to manage the Network Stacks on the Network/Desktops (They were using Novell networking in the Red Cross, and trust me when I say it was not a foregone conclusion that your workstation would be able to talk to your NIC, let alone your Network back in 1998. IRQs, himem.sys and such). The guy leading the cable plant, and punchdowns had been doing so for close to 8 years, and had every type of cable plant certification you can think of. He also got his Cabling company to donate a truckload of brand-new Cat 5E cabling, tools, etc.. Ironically, the least skilled volunteer on our team, (for this kind of work), was a guy by the name of Ed McCreight (though he was still pretty damn handy, and certainly held his own when running cable) - who I only learned later was a fairly Sr. Scientist at Adobe working on their PDF engine, and, oh yeah, had co-invented the B-Tree.