2009/1/9 Brian Brian.Mingus@colorado.edu:
800,000 / 30,000 = 26. Is that not a fair wage? If the Foundation only plans to hire three developers to work on this project then it must be spending the money on something else entirely.
First of all, we're hiring three people because we already have two. We've hired Naoko, and we will allocate Trevor full-time to the project.
Secondly, base salaries if we hire locally (which we do, in this case), are obviously much higher. See payscale.com and other sites to get an idea of salaries in various parts of the world. That does not include recruitment, benefits, equipment, office space and supplies, staff development and travel, administrative overhead such as payroll, etc. Plus the other costs we've budgeted, such as research costs for usability tests, allocation of experienced on-staff developers to support the project, etc.
Thirdly, if you were to hire remotely at lower salaries, you'd simply incur much of the cost you'd save in salaries in other ways, especially management, oversight, and travel. This is especially true for a project of this complexity where you're not just handing some set of specs over to an outsourcing firm. (You of all people, advocating for a complex tool like Semantic MediaWiki, should appreciate that.)
There are isolated projects that can be managed well by giving them to experienced remote developers. For a project of this scope, complexity and importance, I believe it's critical to have a local team that can fully focus on the project and collaborate with the core staff in San Francisco on an as-needed basis.