I can see why one would prefer having a single person in-house, though. In the
long term, it's likely to be cheaper, and people (be it the community, the
board, or other staff) have a named person they can go to with queries about
technical things. A permanent member of staff might also be more easily brought
round to the Wikimedia way of thinking (particularly wrt community involvement,
doing things in the open, and freely licensing their work).
That's not to say that I disagree with Tom or Charles, I'm mostly playing
devil's advocate (not least because I'm not technically competent enough to do
much more than facilitate discussion).
Harry
________________________________
From: Thomas Morton <[email protected]>
To: UK Wikimedia mailing list <[email protected]>
Sent: Monday, 18 June 2012, 15:41
Subject: Re: [Wikimediauk-l] Recruiting for the Developer
On 18 June 2012 15:28, Charles Matthews <[email protected]> wrote:
On 18 June 2012 15:17, HJ Mitchell <[email protected]> wrote:
>> I may be wrong, but I suspect the idea is to aim high, hoping but not
>> expecting that somebody will apply who meets all the criteria, and failing
>> that, that we'll get somebody who meets most of the criteria and could pick
>> up or be trained in the the skills they need.
>
>I don't think you're wrong about that. The "debate so far" has mostly
>been in terms of "it would be nice if" or "we are in the business of
>getting into that business" or other such aspirational stuff.
>
>I'm actually going on my experience of being recruited to do WMUK's
>admin, six months after it should have been clear that WMUK needed at
>least a half-time person, at 12 hours a week. Discussions I had after
>the interview turned out to be utterly fruitless. There were reasons
>for that, but in any case I completely failed to professionalise WMUK
>as the first hire, which should have been on the job description.
>
>No amount of corporate jargon and/or penny-pinching can cover up not
>getting the right person for the job because the position is a vaguish
>proposition. So I think Tom has a point.
This is right.
One of my experiences in around the last 18 months is that smaller companies
(which we are, lets face it) start out contracting technical work because it is
significantly cheaper. We've identified several areas of experience we need:
* PHP development
* Virtual server sysadmin
* SSL (a specific experience in itself!)
* Experience with finance/taking money (again; something quite specific)
* Security reivew
* Project management
* Advocacy
If we have a budget of £29K to spend on people doing this then hiring one
person is far from optimal. Anyone you find will lack requisite experience in
any one of these, which means our objectives won't be met.
On the other hand you have a major asset in that several community members do
have this experience - and might be interested in a robust volunteer driven
model.
Contracting the specific expertise needed, whilst developing a robust community
department is an excellent model :)
Tom
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