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Engineers without borders might be interesting:
http://www.ewb-usa.org/

I like the fact that they have established a way of dealing with their charity faliures , which makes them a respectable charity in my book. ... And adds some credibility to the profession of engineering, imho.

My 2 cents.

http://www.ewb-usa.org/

I have not had the time to join the local chapter, but I'd very much like to learn more.

Try looking into Telecom sans frontieres or Engineers without borders. My initial impression of them is that TSFI does more responsive action (being in places where communication issues are already a problem), while EWB focuses mainly on preventative action (performing local projects). Depending on your interest either of those might fit your skillset. Maybe someone with a different understanding of one or both of these organizations can add more? Let us know how your search goes... I'm in the same market as you; with a degree in logistics and experience in business consulting, and nowhere to volunteer that to.

I don't have any experience with these organizations, but you should check

Engineers without borders

Telecoms sans frontiers (without borders)

(Not affiliated with Doctors Without Borders): http://www.ewb-usa.org/

They had people in Haiti when the quake struck, and some were actually missing for a while. They have at least ten ongoing projects there.

OK that failed utterly. Engineers Without Borders. http://www.ewb-usa.org/haiti.php they're not doing disaster relief per se but are involved in improving infrastructure in Haiti generally.

if you want to make money doing something interesting, consider going into the finance field. i know, i know -- the industry has been much maligned over the past few months (and likely for some time to come), but while they have been shedding plenty of front office jobs (ie. the traders/structurers/sales ppl) these firms will continue to be building, or at least redeploying, their IT departments. the fact is that in finance, building out IT departments is like an arms race, even in down times like these, as calculations on complex financial instruments (like CDOs, natch) become more and more intense. shaving minutes or even seconds off a calculation can literally mean millions of dollars, and that will be reflected in your compensation. CDOs may be gone from the current landscape, but surely there'll be different, and more complicated, instruments to come -- you don't even want to know the kinds of things my group is working on, but it involves many monte carlo simulations that span large server farms.

other benefits include working with the latest and greatest hardware (you should see the rigs the programmers get in comparison to front office staff). also, you'll often have a lot of latitude in whatever platform/design you wish to use. the overwhelming desire of the higher-ups is simply to get something working quickly and correctly. how it's done is usually up to you. finally, you'll often be working on some pretty interesting and challenging problems, though it helps if you are interested in financial topics.

downsides? it's a very demanding environment and the hours can be bad -- but if you're driven, this is usually not a problem. also, for the amount of work you put in, your compensation (though still very generous) will always lag behind that of front office personnel. however, if you're any good, it's not difficult to parlay an IT position into a front office gig, which is what i did. yeah - true, that job market has seen better days, but IT is a great place to stay dormant (yet, visible) until the industry recovers (it will) and the pay returns to exorbitant levels (ditto).

if you don't want to make money tho, doing something like engineers without borders sounds pretty interesting.

There are so many real life puzzles that you can dedicate yourself to solving. The food bank, the local stream restoration group, your local university will have tones volunteer opportunities as well as your local elementary school. There are also many international projects such as Engineers Without Boarders working on clean drinking water, lighting and cooking. These projects have real story lines that effect real people and solving these real problems will introduce you to real people and make you feel real good. Be a producer not just a consumer!

What hope is there for EWB when then can't even link to their West Coast chapter properly? See this page.

An appropriate place for a plug for Engineers without borders"

Unfortunately, the ATDT (appropriate technology design team) portion of EWB (Engineers Without Borders) is not mentioned in this article. In particular, I personally know this group of engineers in the bay area, who worked hard to improve the functionality of the Darfur stove. No credit is given to them in the article or anywhere else, as far as I can tell. However, we all know the nature of this work is selfless, which is what EWB is ultimately about. What is most important is the proliferation of such inventions wherever they may be needed.

Engineers Without Borders http://ewb-usa.org/ might be able to help. We just started a program in Ghana. Best of luck! My fiancee is in Cameroon with the Peace Corps.

The technology is already out there, but whats more important for the implementation of clean water and energy is cost. There are many organizations I know of in this area ("Engineers Without Borders, Nourish International, etc) which engage in these types of prjects around the world and the bottom line is always cost. Perhaps now that more individuals and corporations are working towards simplifying and mass-producing these technologies, the price barrier will shring significantly, allowing the afore-mentioned organizations as well as governments of developing nations to make a significantly more tangible impact on what is a significant and immediate health problem facing hundreds of millions of people around the world.

I was disappointed to see the generally negative view the community seems to have regarding Debian's future. A little background: I am an engineer (not a computer scientist / programmer / developer) that used Unix a good bit a number of years ago. To me, an OS is simply a platform to run desired applications (mathematical analysis, etc., along with general office software).

I didn't mind DOS, but have always hated being dependent on an insecure, unstable Windows - especially when Microsoft continuously decides that I don't really need backward compatability. I tried Linux about 5 years ago, and while I am sure that Linux would have provided an excellent computing platform, I didn't have the time needed to make it do the things I needed it to do. About a year ago, I came across Quantian (http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/quantian.html) - a distribution based on Debian - and got very excited about Linux again. So far, this is the only distro that I've come across with such a wide range of F/OSS scientific and engineering analysis tools.

I don't want to depend on any distro that is controlled by a large commercial enterprise (Novell - Suse, Red Hat Fedora, etc.), because the time may eventually come when they decide that supporting a free distro is no longer in the company's best interest. (I still have bad memories of how Novell let WordPerfect languish to the point that it went from 85% of the wordprocessing market to almost nothing before dumping it on Corel.)

Also, from the comments (today and previously) regarding Debian based distros like Ubuntu, Knoppix, Games Knoppix, etc., it seems that there will be a lot of disappointed people if Debian folds.

Here's to hoping that there will always be high quality F/OSS engineering and scientific tools easily available, and that there will always be a good Linux distro including them!

Shameless plug: Heard of Doctor's without Borders? Who hasn't! But how about Engineers without Borders? [http://www.ewb-usa.org/] A chance for those of us that don't write F/OSS to give back to the world community!