On Mon, Mar 21, 2016 at 6:57 PM, K. Peachey p858snake@gmail.com wrote:
On 21 March 2016 at 22:47, Marc A. Pelletier marc@uberbox.org wrote:
The extra control is hypothetically nice, but in practice one-off
services
that are different from the rest of the infrastructure (as a shop would
be,
like the blog, OTRS, etc) tend to be *extremely* expensive and difficult
to
care for, and tend to be the very weakest points of the system (including privacy and security).
Those are only limited by the choice of the foundation.
If they wanted someone with OTRS/wordpress/cisco ios/SmartTeam/etc skills, they would hire appropriately so the operations team was equipped with the staff and skills needed.
It's like running a shop without a retail manager, It could work, but would work a lot better if it was staffed with people with the appropriate skillsets.
Totally but it's all a balancing act even if you assume we have the resources. To do this correctly you'd need at least one person on the tech side who understand the platform and payments, preferably a couple who could back them up if need be and who can support different parts/make sure they're secure/code reviewed/updated etc + the folks on the front end (the 'shop manager(s)' organizing the actual design/fulfillment/etc). The more you add the more you need to be making to justify it and as someone who did this math a fair bit when I was first setting up the shop we'd need quite a bit more in terms of orders before we were making enough to cover something in house and that was being relatively conservative in costing assuming we would only have to pay for 30-40% of some people etc.
It also gets to the "trade off" question. That is obviously a discussion that is more open and so I won't pretend to have the right answer but I think at our current budget basically every new hire/project basically has to have a trade off the hire that won't be backfilled or the project that is canceled etc. I imagine we all can think of projects that we think are more or less important but we don't necessarily think of the 'same' projects which makes that trade off discussion difficult (but important since we can't just continue to expand the budget forever).
James Alexander Manager Trust & Safety Wikimedia Foundation (415) 839-6885 x6716 @jamesofur