On 04.04.13 19:39, Rubén Martín wrote:
Hi,
I would like to open a discussion here about something that I've been
observing more and more at Mozilla, starting probably 2 years ago or so.
When some team or employee (it's not everyone but a big number) needs
help, first tries to hire or pay someone and then, if he can't or needs
extra help, pings the volunteers. This lead to a lot of situations where
the volunteers are not needed or they are like a extra or free resource,
last bullet good to have.
Historically this was completely the opposite, you have a project or an
idea, you work with all mozillians (current employees and volunteers)
and if you can't make it this way, you look for extra paid help.
Why and when this switch happened?
I would start the discussion saying that I think this a huge problem
right now, if new employees are instructed or used to paid help first,
we will kill the community. It's not nice to feel like free people only
needed if we can't get anything better paying...
Regards.
I'd like to chime in here with three comments:
1) It's one of the best mozilla traditions to recognize people with
leader roles once they've led.
As we're breaching into new aspects of known things and new things
altogether, getting people in charge of things that have led an effort
that's at least related often means getting people out of non-mozilla
ecosystems on board.
That comes with some obvious challenges, and brings along change that's
not always easy to absorb. Including but not limited to screwing up in
new ways. And that's OK.
2) People only work well as long as they're intrinsically motivated.
Volunteers are intrinsically motivated by default. My reading of the
statement above within the context of mozilla is really:
We need to 'manage' paid staff to be volunteers.
"Paid staff" should really only differ to "volunteers" in NDAs and
no-bother-about-the-rent.
3) Volunteers do what's right and within their power
IMHO, the worst misconception about volunteers would be that they're
only doing things they like to do. That's not my experience at all.
Localizers go through DOM error messages, coders write tests and fix
crashers. Neither of those are commonly regarded as fun, but they're the
right thing to do, for well explained reasons, and they're doable.
One shouldn't assume that a paid staff person would do any of those
tasks more passionately or more thoroughly just because they get a pay
check.
Axel
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