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

I'm curious, concretely speaking, what do you have in mind?

FWIW, I'm very thankful to say that Wikimedia has given me many opportunities to develop skills etc. When I made my first edit I didn't know how to program, now that's what I do for living. Much of that is thanks to help and guidance of many Wikimedians. Obviously that's a different type of mentoring than you're suggesting, but nonetheless much of what I know can be directly attributed to mentoring by various people associated with the movement.

-- bawolff