Robin Shannon wrote:
Why, what is wrong with having "people dedendent
on the Foundation for
a regular source of income."? If we were to use only contract workers,
a new person would have to learn the whole system every 3 months, and
it would also make longer term projects more difficult to
do. Contract workers, for sys admin is just crazy talk.
On Jan 14.2005, at 09:29, Ray Saintonge wrote:
>After that the person could not be hired again for at least another
>six months. One thing that this would accomplish is that it would
>avoid having people become dependent on the Foundation for a regular
>source of income.
>
>
If anybody is interested, another FOSS project that has been paying cash
for doing development in this fashion is the Freenet Project
(
http://freenet.sourceforge.net/). There are some projects that have
"gone commercial" that perhaps could be compared as well, but the point
here is that Wikipedia is growing to the point that having some sort of
professional staff might just be necessary.
I think you can set some guidelines down on who would be elegible for
recieving these funds, including perhaps a requirement that the
developer must have been doing volunteer development work for a given
number of months, nominated by the other developers, or "hired" by the
community in some fashion that has widespread approval that the
individual getting the contract really is worthy of getting paid.
Basically, this is "one of us" that is very good at what they are
doing, and already working with the volunteer developers. Sometimes
this relationship may change with money being involved, but if they
already have good relationship with the other developers before they are
hired, I don't think this would change. It would be a major mistake to
hire from outside of the group of volunteer developers if you intend to
keep the volunteer community together.
As an example, IMHO, of how volunteers have been pushed into a
second-class category under professional staff, I would give the Open
Directory Project (
dmoz.org) as an example. This is to show what can go
wrong if professional staff doesn't listen to the community. I have
been a volunteer editor there for almost five years now, and for awhile
there was a huge influx of volunteer "editors" who helped to sift
through web links and edit the descriptions, and create category
classifications to organize the internet. On the whole a rather
ambitious project, and something that I would still like to stay
associated with.
I became a regional editor or a rather large category, and frankly it
was enough to keep me busy just keeping up with all of the work that I
was going through. The problem I was encountering was that the
professional staff was not really "one of us", and often ran roughshod
over the volunteers, including me. I would see changes even to the
portion of the ODP that I was responsible for, with no explaination or
warning that changes were even going to be made. When I would disagree
with the changes, I would be publically ridiculed as not understanding
what was going on, even if other volunteer editors would agree with my
viewpoint. Finally, I was going through huge turnover of volunteers who
were assisting me in sub-categories "under" the one I was working on. I
just stopped working on the project for a few months, in part over my
disgust over what has been going on, and in part due to the fact that
I've had life come up and bite me so I can't put the hours into
volunteer work like I've done in the past. In short, I've been locked
out as a volunteer editor now. Yes, I could reapply, but at this point
it is a barrier where I am not sure if I will ever be associated with
the Open Directory Project again.
Wikipedia is in a similar position where it is growing in huge numbers,
seemingly without end. It also has, for the primary purpose of what it
does, a relatively low barrier to entry for somebody new to come in and
join in the work. From my experience with the Open Directory Project, I
can also point to a time when this growth will end in terms of gaining
new people to write articles. I've also been involved in other
volunteer organizations (political, social, and youth groups) and the
need to keep the volunteers happy should never be underestimated. The
fickle thing about volunteers is that if they don't like what is going
on, they will leave quietly... often without the leaders or those "at
the top" even being able to percieve that there is a problem. If you
hire somebody in any role (developer, PR work, accounting, etc.), you
have to make sure that individual is committed to the goals of the
organization, and if possible would be a volunteer if they would not get
paid for their work. This is true for Wikipedia as it is for the Red Cross.
--
Robert Scott Horning
218 Sunstone Circle
Logan, UT 84321
(435) 753-3330
robert_horning(a)netzero.net