Hi Fae,
We have 215 staff in total, with a hub of activity in San Francisco and
other staff in several other states and 18 countries. So I agree talented
people can be found globally and WMF does hire the best talent it can find
wherever they are located. At this point adding offices in other locations
add cost without any benefits to the community or the Wikimedia
Foundation. We also do not have the luxury of Mozilla's $300 million
budget that can support a London office or Microsoft's billions to have a
globally distributed workforce with offices. So we are not closing the
door to anything. Based on our test project of trying to develop centers of
activity in other parts of the United States there is no need for
additional offices. We do need and will continue to hire a globally
distributed staff of talented people to support our global community of
talented volunteers.
Regards,
Garfield
On Thu, Apr 9, 2015 at 2:19 AM, Fæ <faewik(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On 9 April 2015 at 01:16, Garfield Byrd
<gbyrd(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:
... The advantages of having good access to
talented people and
organizations WMF interacts with far outweigh any advantages to moving
to a
lower cost location outside of the San Francisco
market area.
I find the world-view expressed here slightly odd to read, perhaps
because I am more European than American in background.
My background includes working for long periods with many companies in
the U.S. (such as Microsoft) and we managed to do that perfectly with
a handful of employees in a Seattle office, and most developers and
internal operations such as HR, finance etc. in Europe (very few of
these people ever had a need or desire to talk directly with customers
or partner organizations). It was easy enough for me to visit the U.S.
a couple of times a year when there was a lot going on there, and work
on a daily basis within a lively virtual team spread out in offices
across London, Paris and New York.
"Talented people" can be found in many places including San Francisco,
and though Google is incredibly important, there many other critically
important potential open knowledge partners without headquarters in SF
(Europeana springs to mind). Even Mozilla has a very nice office to
work with here in London. The idea that having all functions in SF has
advantages that "far outweigh" all other considerations seems to
over-egg the case, perhaps it would be a good thing to leave the door
open a crack for alternative ways of working to be possible in a far
future.
Fae
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Garfield Byrd
Chief of Finance and Administration
Wikimedia Foundation
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