The Volunteer's Guide to the Galaxy has been around since 2001, it started as a small idea that was cooked up over a few glasses of wine at the Rijksmuseum during the International Volunteering Conference in Amsterdam in January 2001, between Brian Culgelman (United Nations volunteers Webmaster for the International year of the volunteer), Nina Bowbridge (Youth Leadership expert Woking in the Community sector in Australia), Sheri Lake (a Canadian school teacher who was piloting volunteering to under twelve-year-olds), Cees Houten (volunteering coordinator for the National volunteering centre for the Netherlands) and Norvan Vogt (a self-proclaimed techno -- freedom -- fighter) [that's me]
I was a bright eyed and bushy tailed volunteer who was working with the International Youth Foundation on the Youth Action Net website. I payed my own way to go to the conference as I thought it would be a great opportunity to meet like-minded people at an international conference as well as gather some content for the Youth Action Net website. After the conference myself and Brian ended up working on the youth portal of the International year of the volunteer website. It was apparent from the amount of people on our online forum that we should put together a guide to the people who are volunteers to help them plot their way through the amazing amount of information and ideas on social change. The idea was picked up by the United Nations as an output for the end of the year of the volunteer. Unfortunately due to lack of funds we never produce the CD but most of the content that was generated from the project as well as the Byte multimedia contest I took with me and started to disseminate via e-mail to any people that were interested.
As more and more people were interested in the e-mail as I was sending out it became apparent that there were other people adding to the guide and that there were a number of different versions floating around cyberspace. So I spent a fair amount of time putting all of this together and hosting this on my own personal web site. This is not such a bad situation and I got a lot of hits of my website. Unfortunately it was not very attractive and never really did to fulfil people's needs.
In June 2004 I started writing this current website, I wanted to put together a collaborative document system that would help us share information with people. So what you see before you is evolution three of the Volunteers guide to the Galaxy. I hope that it is of some use to you. It is not really designed as a online community but more as a knowledge base.
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