On 13 February 2015 at 23:54, James Hare <james.hare(a)wikidc.org> wrote:
On Thursday, February 12, 2015 at 9:11 AM, Liam Wyatt
wrote:
Dear GLAMWiki-verse,
[tl;dr Seeking feedback. Please read the GWT 2.0 grant application
draft before I submit it officially:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:PEG/Europeana/GLAMwiki_Toolset ]
Thank you very much for taking ownership of GLAMwiki Toolset—a huge
project that the WMF is not interested in and no one else really has the
resources for.
I consider this project central to Wikimedia DC’s strategic priorities and
consider its funding to be essential. I am critical of a couple of points:
* On the must/should/could/won’t scale, I would consider “improving
documentation” to be a *lot* higher than simply “could.” A regular
criticism I hear of the toolset is that the documentation is lousy, and if
your goal is to encourage more people to use it without expert help, you
*need* better documentation. I would consider elevating the priority for
this.
* You will get dinged on your labor rates. Is there a particular reason
why it costs $100/hour to build an upload tool, a piece of software that is
not terribly specialized—even when considering EU labor rates? This isn’t
really a concern for me or Wikimedia DC since we’re not paying for it, but
I would be prepared to discuss this should it come up.
Those points aside, I really look forward to seeing the improvements that
come out of this project. Best of luck to you and Europeana!
Cheers,
James
—
James Hare
President, Wikimedia DC
http://wikimediadc.org
@wikimediadc
Thanks for the endorsement James :-)
[hint, hint...
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:PEG/Europeana/GLAMwiki_Toolset#Endor…
]
I'm going to respond to the financial question right away because a couple
of other people have asked me similar things offlist. It's a valid topic to
raise so I might as well publicly reply-all :-) I'll paraphrase this issue
as two questions:
Question 1: How do you justify the labor rates?
Answer: To try to answer that, I have added a new paragraph in the grant
application earlier today:
"The daily-rate of the different roles listed here is calculated based on
the average hourly salary of the relevant *Europeana* employees. As a
project-based organisation that frequently accepts funding tied to specific
objectives, *Europeana* frequently operates by accounting for its staff
obligations in 1 hour blocks. Therefore, the costs listed here are not
invented specifically for a grant application, they are simply the normal
hourly salary of that person *x* 8 hours = 1 daily rate."
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:PEG/Europeana/GLAMwiki_Toolset#Total…
I hope this answers the question sufficiently, although I do understand
that it is not the detailed "justification" that you might like. In short,
this is just how much the relevant staff cost.
Question 2: Could it be done cheaper elsewhere?
Answer: Yeah - probably. No one is pretending that Europeana is the
cheapest organisation for building software - especially since it does not
normally build software for external organisation - but they're also the
only ones with the technical ability, organisational willingness and
availability right now. Some others might have the capacity, or the
willingness, or the availability - but not all three.
As with the first question, I hope that this explains sufficiently. It is a
fair question, and I've tried to give it as straightforward an answer as I
can.
p.s. I may not be able to respond quickly to any further questions for the
next couple of days (it being the weekend and all).
-Liam / Wittylama
In my capacity as "*that Europeana guy*"