Hi Quim, I was digressing a little from the original subject of this thread when I talked about WMF career development support for volunteers, but here are a few suggestions:
1. Prioritize work on the open badges system. 2. Make information about WMF contract positions more public. Currently, the system for hiring contractors seems to be opaque and largely at the discretion of the C staff. The discretion is fine, but some additional openness could be beneficial here, for recruiting purposes and for financial & programmatic transparency. 3. Develop a central hub where WMF, Wikimedia affiliates, and mission-aligned organizations can post links to intern, contract, and staff openings. WMF could do this in partnership with an organization like Mozilla, the Free Software Foundation, Code for America, or the Ford Foundation. This hub might fit well with the WMF Partnership Department's mission, in addition to WMF HR's recruiting mission. 4. Support the Volunteer Supporters Network <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Volunteer_Supporters_Network> initiative on Meta; encourage peer support and networking opportunities among Wikimedia volunteers. 5. Post monthly emails to appropriate Wikimedia mailing lists about intern, contract, and full-time openings at WMF and affiliates that may be of interest to members of those lists. 6. Develop an active mentorship program at WMF that encourages WMF employees to mentor high-potential volunteers in their career development, ideally leading to a role at WMF or a mission-aligned organization. The Individual Engagement Grants Program and GSOC already do some of this with their grantees and interns, and the concept could be expanded to other programs and departments. 7. Continue to expand the number of intern opportunities at WMF. WMF benefits from the inexpensive labor, and the interns benefit from the experience and the networking opportunities. Thoughts? We can take this discussion to Meta if it's getting to complicated and diverging too much from the original purpose of this thread. Thanks! Pine Pine On Fri, Jul 3, 2015 at 7:13 AM, Quim Gil <q...@wikimedia.org> wrote: > Anders, I don't think I'm underestimating the competence we have in this > community. I'm wondering which demographics we should look at in order to > detect potential candidates for engineering executives (replying to Pine's > ping). I'm also suggesting that improving the communication of our open > positions with our communities is probably the way to go because I think > potential candidates do exist, although finding a good CTO is more complex > than finding a good JavaScript developer (although, wait..) ;) > > Pine, for what is worth, in almost every Google Summer of Code / Outreachy > round we have ended up recruiting a volunteer. Several WMF teams offer > internships, some of them filled with Wikimedia volunteers. A percentage of > new hires comes from our communities (I don't have data but I do read the > announcements). I'm sure more can be done, and I'm sure implementable > solutions are welcome. But back to this thread, one thing is to help > volunteers to develop skills and experience to apply for junior positions, > and another thing is to do... what? to ease the search of potential > executives within our communities. > > I don't want to argue, I just want to know what can the Engineering > Community team realistically do to connect better our technical volunteers > with our technical job openings. I'm sure HR welcomes feedback about > implementable improvements as well. They want to find best candidates > anywhere, and they know that Wikimedia itself is a good pool. But we cannot > hire the candidates that don't find us or that we cannot find... Which > brings us back to the need to formulate practical solutions. > > > On Fri, Jul 3, 2015 at 3:14 PM, Pine W <wiki.p...@gmail.com> wrote: > > > Another thought: perhaps more investment could be made in providing > career > > development support for our volunteers of all kinds. It's relatively > common > > in the United States for organizations with lots of volunteers to put > some > > investment explicitly into helping the volunteers develop skills snd > > experience that are useful for both their voluntary and paid work CVs. If > > more of that kind of investment was made by WMF, volunteering would be > more > > attractive *and* WMF would benefit by having more ability to fill paid > > positions from the ranks of volunteers. > > > > Pine > > _______________________________________________ > > Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: > > https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines > > Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org > > Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, > > <mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe> > > > > > > -- > Quim Gil > Engineering Community Manager @ Wikimedia Foundation > http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Qgil > _______________________________________________ > Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: > https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines > Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org > Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, > <mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe> > _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, <mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe>
