I'm not a involved in technology professionally, but I did handle most
of the tech work for WMUK's first fundraiser in 2009.

Great! I've been trying to find someone able to give me a good overview of what exactly is needed (tech-wise) for the fundraiser to little effect. Any chance you could fill me in on what was/is needed?

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.

I appreciate the fundraiser is something of a special case - although again I can't bring my experience to bear on it because I don't have a full spec.

On the other hand we risk ending up with the same situation as this year; no one working tech... so I'd prefer to see not-quite-enough tech support instead.

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.)

True, some aspects are hard to handle remotely. But, again, this gives us a tech resource to draw on and helps justify FTE in 2014.

Realistically speaking; if you're paying Ł35K for a developer/manager (which is what the last job description was looking for) it's not a great use of his or her time to be fixing laptops :) If this is a major issue there are contract tech support services we could look into to fill this specific gap that would be more cost effective.

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.

So this just needs prioritising; not everything will get support - but that, again, is another data point.

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.

This is a silly idea, as I said before, and we should forget about this for a moment. Focus on our own tech needs.

Even if we hire a FTE getting them to do this in their schedule would be a waste of money.

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 have considered everything I've been told so far about our own needs; and added on top of it my own experience in working this way. So I am confident one day per week is sufficient in the short term.

In fact, companies almost always overestimate the tech time they need. This is because they see projects that might fill 4 days of work - and extrapolate that the developer is going to be BUSY. The truth is you get busy periods and lulls - and a good engineer will be able to manage time effectively to spread this out (for example; fundraiser might need lots of work, but if you start in May...).

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.

What's the alternative? We can't find someone to do all the stuff we need at the budget we have set. And a FTE is certainly too much for our next years needs.

The best approach is to bring in a minimum utility and work up from there; justifying a FTE for the 2014 budget will be MUCH easier if we can say "look at X specific things we didn't have time to do".

Tom

(ps you replied Offlist - not sure if that was intentional but I kept it off-list just in case :))