On Mon, Mar 21, 2016 at 6:57 PM, K. Peachey <p858snake(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On 21 March 2016 at 22:47, Marc A. Pelletier
<marc(a)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