Hi!
Back in 2006 I wanted to make search better, and if then it wasn't for Tim Starling to give me shell access and a couple of test servers to play with, I think we would not have the new search, or at least not developed by me.
I probably have similar story to share :)
Unfortunately, on the infrastructure/operations engineering side, there has been a shift to this whole new "we are a major website that should never go down" concept, which restricts volunteers from getting immediate shell accesses. On one hand, some of us have been lucky to join when there were no such constraints and could go through all the learning process, on another - we wouldn't get such access nowadays.
I quite enjoyed when our site SLA was "more up than down", or you know, when none of us had many interests outside having this damn thing work :)
In commercial organizations besides signing "I won't do crap" contracts, there's also "loss of income" incentive that protects from doing crap. Our infrastructure (and infrastructure team) is way smaller than all the aspirations around of "being a top site". How would we match volunteer contributions in this field with overall demands?
Domas
P.S. There have been way more folks telling "pay me!" than "how can I volunteer" in the infra side, than on mw dev, I guess ;-)