By Suzanne Perry

Washington

Starting today, the Corporation for National and Community Service will no longer allow people to register volunteer opportunities directly on Serve.gov, the Obama administration’s volunteer Web site — a move that was welcomed by some nonprofit groups that operate their own volunteer-matching sites.

“We have concluded that the most appropriate role for us is to promote service and offer tools that make it easier for Americans to find volunteer opportunities, but not to be in the direct business of operating a volunteer registry, given the fact that there are a number of existing non-governmental volunteer matching Web sites that already provide these services,” Nicola Goren, the corporation’s acting chief executive, wrote in an e-mail message last week to groups that had used the registry.

Serve.gov will continue to carry listings from third-party services like VolunteerMatch, Idealist, and the HandsOn Network that provide data to All for Good a volunteer search engine created by representatives of groups including Google, the Craigslist Foundation, and YouTube.

“It’s a great decision,” said Ami Dar, founder of Idealist. “We’re not sure they were the best agency to handle individuals volunteering.”

Screening Concerns

Stephen Goldsmith, interim chairman of the corporation’s board, said in an interview that the agency changed course because it was worried about competing with existing sites and about potential legal complications related to monitoring the volunteer listings that were posted by individuals and groups.

The corporation did not screen the listings, which Mr. Goldsmith said was problematic since most citizens would assume “some level of appropriate vetting” on a government site. Yet lawyers told the agency it could run into First Amendment free-speech challenges if it attempted to decide which groups were using the site appropriately and which weren’t.

“We were competing with the private sector without providing due diligence and with restrictions on the due diligence we can have,” he said.

As one example of how Serve.gov can become politicized, some conservative commentators have criticized it for carrying volunteer listings for Acorn, the community-organizing group that is now under fire because undercover videos showed staff members offering advice to conservative activists posing as a pimp and a prostitute.

Ashley Etienne, a corporation spokeswoman, said the agency removed one listing for Acorn after receiving complaints because it did not meet the site’s “terms of participation” — but it has removed a variety of listings from other groups for the same reason. The terms require groups to post only activities related to community service and to conduct themselves in a “civil manner.”

Ms. Etienne said about 10,000 groups have posted volunteer opportunities directly on Serve.gov since it started earlier this year.

Greg Baldwin, president of VolunteerMatch, said his group was never happy that the administration had started its own volunteer registry rather than “investing in existing solutions” as part of its effort to promote “social innovation.”

“We thought we could get more done cooperating with the corporation than competing with it, and that managing their own data base, regardless of their own motivations or aspirations, would just put us in competition,” he said.

He added that the system also confused nonprofit groups that weren’t aware that all VolunteerMatch opportunities were listed automatically on Serve.gov and wondered if they had to list them in both places.

Volunteer opportunities that were posted on Serve.gov before today will remain on the site until Nov. 30.

More information about the new policy is available on Serve.gov.