On 02 March 2017 at 00:11 Michael Peel <email@mikepeel.net> wrote:

Hi Lucy,

I've added a few comments to the google docs - sorry for not quite meeting your deadline.

I see that the new volunteers policy removes a key phrase that was often used in WMUK's past: "staff should only do things that volunteers either cannot do or do not want to do".

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When we hired the new staff members we tried to focus them on being enablers that would scale up volunteer activity rather than replace it (e.g., coordination roles). Sadly, I think that worry was realised anyway, and staff did displace volunteer work in, e.g., talking to potential partners, at a time when there were still volunteers willing to do that work but they just weren't being invited to do so.

The "either-or" thinking behind this argument was and is wrong-headed, anyway. 

What I would call the "freelance" approach to institutional contacts gives no guarantee of continuity. We know that if it is one volunteer dealing with one person in an institution, the relationship can easily go up in smoke. If it is one contact in the office, ditto. These things are easy to illustrate from recent history. To use the word "displace" when there should be a properly understood division of labour is a reminder of past bad management, really. 

I think that's part of what then led WMUK to become so London-centric, as that's where its staff was, even though its volunteers were distributed much more widely.

Well, how about thinking instead in new terms, rather than this old blame game?

At the recent education conference we heard from Melissa Highton of the University of Edinburgh, in her keynote. about "getting the Wikimedian in Residence out of the library". GLAMs are more strongly concentrated around London than the university system; and learned societies even more so. I think it was fantastically unhelpful to slur over the difference between education policy and the WiR policy, as was done around 2014. 

Anyway, the so-called "key phrase" never did much good, in my recollection, so I'm glad to see the back of it.

Charles