awg's blog Rarely Used.

VolSched - The Online Volunteer Scheduling Solution

A couple of years ago, I wrote a script called Shift Scheduler to solve the problem of scheduling volunteers for events. I used it for a couple of installfests, and I still get lots of emails from people with questions about it. Scheduling volunteers is a pain, and having a way to let volunteers sign up for the jobs they want to do is nice. It's also an underserved need.

I noticed that a lot of people who contacted me about Shift Scheduler were event organizers, not technical people, and that they needed help to set up the script on their servers. Even some technical people had trouble with it, since it requires an assortment of non-standard Perl modules. I decided it would probably be good to provide a hosted service where people could create events, jobs and shifts just as they would with Shift Scheduler, then give potential volunteers the URL to their event and let them sign up. I figured some people might even want the world to be able to see their events, in some sort of listing.

Thus, VolSched was born. It's pretty, it works well, and it provides all the features listed above. It's free to use, and I plan to eventually release the source so others can run it themselves. We'll see what the uptake is like, but hopefully people find it useful.