Complaining about this is like saying the apocryphal jilted wife who sold her husband's prized Porsche for $1 has affected the price of Porsches.
I think the spirit of the complaining is more of a warning to keep an eye out for the trend rather than stop these one-offs altogether, but that's a lot harder to say and act on than "stop these one-offs".
If it turns out that volunteerism is reliable, then awesome! 18F just discovered that by spending time to nail down detailed reqs the govt can let patriotic citizens contribute to their society by helping on projects! Everyone wins and things are awesome!
If on the other hand your intuition is that volunteerism is unreliable, then this just short-circuited an early experiment by 18F to figure out a reliable piecework system for doing IT development.
My intuition matches the second case, but there's an existence proof that the first might actually be correct. It'd be a totally awesome story if it was, so I have a hard time being sad. And even if it isn't, it may give 18F folks a think, as in "hmm, perhaps some of these projects are appropriate for volunteerism; is there a context where we can develop tools for that use case? universities? job training?"
I didn't result in any such thing, nor does the linked article suggest it does. A million t-shirts dumped in Africa would have less effect than the same number dumped in the USA.
The problem stems from contributions that have a big impact. Big impact can be achieved by one person contributing a large amount, or many people contributing small amounts.
Another comment referred to this article where a Florida business man donated a million t-shirts to Africa that resulted in the textile industry bankruptcy: http://content.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1987628,00...
Was it bad just by giving away t-shirts? I don't think so. Was it bad just by giving away that many t-shirts? I don't think so either.
It was bad because his actions created a dependency on an unreliable source while removing the main income source that sustains reliable ones. If he subsidized the income loss of the textile industry, the consequences would not have been as devastating.
That's really the crux of the argument; giving away things for free generally takes income from dependable sources of labour. It's only when it has a big impact that people pay attention.
Going back to the topic, the same can be said about volunteering. I think it's okay if volunteering dislodges an entire industry as long as the volunteering is sustainable and reliable.