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Shifting Time: The Future of Volunteerism?

As an Experience Analyst here at Idealist, Scott S. spends a lot of time exploring the latest tools and ideas the internet has to offer. Here's a piece he wrote recently:

An idea I've been thinking a lot about lately is how the future of volunteering and ideas like timebanking and thecommon.org will radically change, once mobile platforms like the iPhone, the Blackberry, and Google's Android begin to proliferate and services like Fire Eagle are integrated into these websites.

One of the biggest problems with timebanking, and volunteering in general, is that they work like a set TV schedule. There's no timeshifting technology involved (like a Tivo for volunteering) based on the convenience of the volunteer and not that of the organizing body. This idea doesn't revolve so much around selfishness as it does efficiency: what should we be doing when we find ourselves with 2 to 3 hours to kill that we hadn't planned? My iPhone needs to tell me, based on my profile and preferences (on whichever service), that there are volunteering opportunities RIGHT NOW within a certain distance to where I am, how to get there, and what I'll be doing (like tutoring, teaching a skill, neighborhood cleanup, etc.). Of course, for this to work, the matching of the volunteer to the person on the receiving end needs to be seamless. Something akin to Google's Dodgeball?

I'll give you an example of the timeshifting idea in a similar (though not the same) context.

A friend of mine writes for globalvoicesonline.org and has many readers. Part of his job requires that he travel and attend various seminars and conferences related to his work, all around the world. He sometimes speaks at these events and always writes about them.

As he hops from country to country, he posts volunteering opportunities at all his stops on the site Dopplr.com. For the people that follow him, and have befriended him on Dopplr, they'll see that he's in Jamaica, what he was speaking on, and what relevant volunteering events are taking place in or around Kingston. He's a trusted individual, in a trusted network; and if I were in Jamaica, even on vacation, I might just show up and help. This isn't exactly spontaneous, but I might not normally be looking to volunteer while I was on vacation, but because I had time to kill I might just want to.

I really believe that once volunteering opportunities are less restricted and decentralized, like everything else decentralized (p2p, blogs, new aggregation, even materials production), volunteering and related opportunities will hit a huge growth curve.

There are a bunch of holes in this idea, and much to think through. What do you think?