On 02 March 2017 at 00:11 Michael Peel
<email(a)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".
<snip>
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