Forwarding Lila's email to the Treasurer's list in case affiliates are thinking about remote vs. local employee placements and would be interested in hearing about WMF's team structures for possible adaptation.
Pine ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: "Pine W" wiki.pine@gmail.com Date: Apr 9, 2015 4:45 PM Subject: Re: [Wikimedia-l] WMF office location and remodel To: "Wikimedia Mailing List" wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Cc:
Interesting. I look forward to seeing these new structures. Thanks Lila.
Pine On Apr 9, 2015 1:53 PM, "Lila Tretikov" lila@wikimedia.org wrote:
All --
As a matter of strategy we should be leveraging our open-source roots more as we grow. This means distributed, loosely-coupled teams. We know from software industry history that distributed teams work best when they are *entirely* distributed. We are working on some structures that will allow teams to either be entirely distributed or mostly co-located, consistent with what we know about best outcomes. In SF, remote working is not very common as the software companies demand people to be on-site and we have an advantage with remote talent, but it is also not for everyone as it can be isolating. Net-net.. before we worry about growth and costs we need to worry about effectiveness, but we are thinking about this.
Thanks, Lila
On Thu, Apr 9, 2015 at 9:02 AM, Fæ faewik@gmail.com wrote:
On 9 April 2015 at 16:47, Garfield Byrd gbyrd@wikimedia.org wrote:
Hi Fae,
We have 215 staff in total, with a hub of activity in San Francisco and other staff in several other states and 18 countries. So I agree
talented
people can be found globally and WMF does hire the best talent it can
find
wherever they are located. At this point adding offices in other
locations
add cost without any benefits to the community or the Wikimedia Foundation. We also do not have the luxury of Mozilla's $300 million budget that can support a London office or Microsoft's billions to
have a
globally distributed workforce with offices. So we are not closing the door to anything. Based on our test project of trying to develop
centers
of
activity in other parts of the United States there is no need for additional offices. We do need and will continue to hire a globally distributed staff of talented people to support our global community of talented volunteers.
Thanks for the response, it makes sense to me.
I agree with avoiding additional offices unless there is a very good business case. Back in the late 1990s I was part of a small consultancy where we chose to eliminate having a central office altogether. It was a strange thing to try back last century, but moving more of the administrative functions into the virtual working space, and arming employees with excellent teamworking tools they can use from home (or bookable office spaces locally) has become part of the ordinary world of work these days.
WMF development happens this way already, and you writing here shows that management/executive level folks are comfortable and skilled with virtual spaces. It would be jolly interesting if the WMF were seen to try out more virtual methods in other parts of its operation, and find meaningful ways of reporting on benefits or avoidable costs. I see this as part of the learning organization... Maybe a topic for another thread at some point. :-)
Fae
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