Anders, I don't think I'm underestimating the competence we have in this community. I'm wondering which demographics we should look at in order to detect potential candidates for engineering executives (replying to Pine's ping). I'm also suggesting that improving the communication of our open positions with our communities is probably the way to go because I think potential candidates do exist, although finding a good CTO is more complex than finding a good JavaScript developer (although, wait..) ;)
Pine, for what is worth, in almost every Google Summer of Code / Outreachy round we have ended up recruiting a volunteer. Several WMF teams offer internships, some of them filled with Wikimedia volunteers. A percentage of new hires comes from our communities (I don't have data but I do read the announcements). I'm sure more can be done, and I'm sure implementable solutions are welcome. But back to this thread, one thing is to help volunteers to develop skills and experience to apply for junior positions, and another thing is to do... what? to ease the search of potential executives within our communities.
I don't want to argue, I just want to know what can the Engineering Community team realistically do to connect better our technical volunteers with our technical job openings. I'm sure HR welcomes feedback about implementable improvements as well. They want to find best candidates anywhere, and they know that Wikimedia itself is a good pool. But we cannot hire the candidates that don't find us or that we cannot find... Which brings us back to the need to formulate practical solutions.
On Fri, Jul 3, 2015 at 3:14 PM, Pine W wiki.pine@gmail.com wrote:
Another thought: perhaps more investment could be made in providing career development support for our volunteers of all kinds. It's relatively common in the United States for organizations with lots of volunteers to put some investment explicitly into helping the volunteers develop skills snd experience that are useful for both their voluntary and paid work CVs. If more of that kind of investment was made by WMF, volunteering would be more attractive *and* WMF would benefit by having more ability to fill paid positions from the ranks of volunteers.
Pine _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe