On Apr 17, 2015 4:15 AM, "Tim Starling" tstarling@wikimedia.org wrote:
On 15/04/15 22:45, Craig Franklin wrote:
I do think that it's doesn't particularly match up for the Foundation to base itself in one of the most expensive cities in the world, citing the local talent pool, when a lot of the tech staff are being recruited elsewhere and are working remotely. I did feel that a lot of the motivation to moving to SF in the first place was because for some high level staff, leading a tech-based organisation in SF looked better on
the
old CV than leading a tech-based organisation in Flint, Gary, or East
St.
Louis would.
Heh. Flint was never considered, for some reason.
I have a spreadsheet which Sue sent to all staff prior to the decision, which has a points system weighing up the various options, "not in order to determine the final location, but just as a jumping-off point for discussion". It suggests that local talent pool was a minor consideration.
San Francisco had the most points, followed by Boston. San Francisco beat Boston substantially in the "proximity to partners and likeminded organizations" category, since San Francisco had EFF, OSI, CC, Mozilla, Wikia and a few others. San Francisco also got a bonus for having a Board member living near it, specifically Jimmy Wales. Jimmy was presumably following Wikia, which was set up in San Mateo in order to be close to investors.
Boston scored a lot of points for "ease of international communication", which was based on the timezone difference from Europe. They were almost the same on "proximity to technology", which considered tech companies generally and availability of computer science graduates, the closest category to Craig's idea of a local talent pool: 8 points for SF and 7 for Boston. The total was 88 to 73.
I think we do benefit from proximity to technology. There is a lot of staff turnover in the tech industry, people tend to spend 2-3 years at one tech company and then move on to another one. It gives the Bay Area a kind of shared tech culture. Innovations introduced in one place are stirred around the Bay by staff movement.
-- Tim Starling
Tim, I am not too sure about this. No single piece of open source software comes to my mind when hearing bay area or silicon Valley. And no people living there and no company located there. Except the Gnu c compiler and may postgres no single piece of open source software came out of the United states, at least not without pressure from software from other countries, mostly German speaking, Scandinavia, Asia.
Do you not have the impression beeing located in the United states poisons the minds of people and has quite a bad influence on the technology output of Wmf? Did you ever meet some young hungry person with good ideas there willing to contribute? The only goal of a brilliant person in the this area is to get rich with his own company. I d curious to hear how you handle such conflict of interest.
Rupert