Sending this again because it went off-list by accident. Anyone know why Tom's email didn't have a reply-to header?
On 22 August 2012 19:19, Thomas Morton <[email protected]> wrote: >> I think WMUK's tech needs are substantially more than 0.2 FTE. > > I disagree; indeed no one has actually properly enumerated, in one place, > all of the tech needs - so how we can be sure I don't know (hint: this is > what I've been trying to prompt from the get go) > > [snip] I'm not a involved in technology professionally, but I did handle most of the tech work for WMUK's first fundraiser in 2009. That was an extremely simplistic and ineffective fundraiser, and it still took me significantly more than a day a week in tech work (plus a significant amount of Mike's time as well). Admittedly, someone that didn't keep having to stop to google CSS they had forgotten could have done it a little quicker, but it's still a lot of work to implement and maintain the kind of fundraising system we need. I can pretty much guarantee that WMUK lost money last year by not having a streamlined system for setting up direct debits, and that was because they didn't have the paid tech resource they needed. Then consider office tech support, which is on your list. That's something you can't really do remotely and part-time. If something goes wrong, you need to be there to fix it. With a rapidly growing office, that's going to take up a significant amount of time as well. (It's probably half a day's work just to set up each new staff member.) Then there is supporting programmes. We've pretty much just made do without good tech for our programmes, but if you had a tech person in the office you can be sure that people would come up with a lot of programme related work for them. In addition, a lot of people think we should be paying someone to do some mediawiki development. Writing extensions that we think are important and that the WMF isn't supporting, for instance. You could easily fill a day a week with that. And finally there is all the work that you don't realise exists because you've never had anyone to do it but inevitably discover as soon as there is someone available to do it ("Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion." [1]). That can include very productive and valuable things. I think you we hire a 0.2 FTE contractor, we'll quickly find we are going ridiculously over budget on overtime and end up increasing the standard hours. Once you do that, the arguments in favour of a PT contractor rather than a FT employee reduce. 1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson%27s_law (usually referenced in regards to unproductive work, but quite a lot of the extra work is productive even if not vital) _______________________________________________ Wikimedia UK mailing list [email protected] http://mail.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediauk-l WMUK: http://uk.wikimedia.org
