Thought-provoking post over on isabel wang's blog:

When you ask for X hours of someone's time to help put up pre-made signs or read off telemarketing scripts, each volunteer means no more to you than just another undifferentiated source of labor. No one is put to their highest and best use.

Regardless of what you think of the presidential candidates and the general state of American politics, I think that focusing on what the volunteer is bringing to the table just makes sense when your organization depends on volunteers.

A point that a lot of companies miss about people who volunteer their time and energy towards open-source projects like Mozilla is that volunteers are not coming to finish your to-do list for you, they are trying to make their world a better place by using you as the vehicle. They may not all do what you want or represent you the way that you'd like, but hopefully if everyone is coming from the same core set of ideals then everyone ends up richer for it.