Comment by jjmarr
2 days ago
I'd love it if my government created a civil reserve for technology workers. Let me volunteer every weekend to help fix infrastructure so I don't have to give up my existing job.
2 days ago
I'd love it if my government created a civil reserve for technology workers. Let me volunteer every weekend to help fix infrastructure so I don't have to give up my existing job.
If it was a volunteer effort without ulterior motives, it would be beneficial to society, but ultimately who is on call? Who pushes for hard, but beneficial changes that might not have immediate obvious value? Who accepts risk or responsibility.
Ultimately that’s the point of the market. Incentivize people to take risks for rewards. Allow others to improve on proven models for lower costs. Unfortunately, government does not have any risk/reward or other market pressures.
It's pretty common for traditional organised volunteer services to have "on call" aspects.
Think of like volunteer firefighters, The Samaritans, St John Ambulance, the UK lifeguards and lifeboats (RNLI). Such organisations do usually have full time paid staff too, but the bulk of the front line work is part time volunteer.
This is on one hand quite the fantastic idea, but I imagine it falls down to bureaucracy, for example for health services related stuff everyone would need pretty thorough training in the legal aspects, and insurance might be difficult, and preventing malicious actors from contributing so probably security clearance (for example if the military use it for their healthcare) or at least a thorough background check. I think open sourcing everything is far far easier than a volunteer based setup.