Towards AI-Driven Transformation of Volunteering

Voluntary engagement is an indispensable cornerstone of Critical Infrastructures (CI) such as civil protection, disaster, crisis and rescue management as well as health and social services. Sustainability of the voluntary sector, however, is massively endangered by profound changes in demography, social structure, and volunteer motives in the sense of individualization and pluralization of society. To address these challenges, this paper contributes a research roadmap for leveraging recent advances in Artificial Intelligence (AI) specifically for the volunteer sector, discussing the proposed research design and methods together with research objectives and promising technological solutions. A brief discussion of a first prototypical realization of LLM-based skill extraction from volunteering opportunities and an outlook on future research complements this contribution.