Postscript (sorry): this isn't a time-sensitive question, so please respond at your convenience. Thanks (: Pine On Apr 7, 2015 9:58 PM, "Pine W" <wiki.pine(a)gmail.com> wrote:

On 8 April 2015 at 06:07, Aleksey Bilogur <aleksey.bilogur(a)gmail.com> wrote: Plenty of companies and charities happily move their HQ building location with more staff gaining benefits rather than losing them. I was involved with a corporate move where most staff went from London to Glasgow, with the benefit that their family and social lives improved and they could afford to buy large houses with the same money it takes to buy half a small flat in London. Presented the right way, a move can improve staff commitment and even reduce turnover. You also can't have it both ways, the WMF is supposed to be a multi-location global organization. Strategically it would be better to grow globally in several locations, rather than always having everyone in the same offices in the same city on the West Coast of America. Our staff and volunteers are highly experienced in virtual cooperation and meetings, the WMF could even become an exemplar for how that works for smaller organizations with global teams. Fae -- faewik(a)gmail.com https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Fae

I know from experience that East St Louis is pretty cheap, and it's centrally located. And the weather is almost as good as California, but without the Hurricanes. How do the WMF staff feel about moving to East St Louis? I imagine they would be *thrilled*. Richard Symonds Wikimedia UK 0207 065 0992 Wikimedia UK is a Company Limited by Guarantee registered in England and Wales, Registered No. 6741827. Registered Charity No.1144513. Registered Office 4th Floor, Development House, 56-64 Leonard Street, London EC2A 4LT. United Kingdom. Wikimedia UK is the UK chapter of a global Wikimedia movement. The Wikimedia projects are run by the Wikimedia Foundation (who operate Wikipedia, amongst other projects). *Wikimedia UK is an independent non-profit charity with no legal control over Wikipedia nor responsibility for its contents.* On 8 April 2015 at 14:57, Oliver Keyes <ironholds(a)gmail.com> wrote:

On Tue, Apr 7, 2015 at 9:58 PM Pine W <wiki.pine(a)gmail.com> wrote: Keep in mind that the WMF already mitigates the cost and competition of the San Francisco Bay Area market by recruiting remote employees. According to the recent report ( https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:State_of_the_Wikimedia_Foundation.p…) a large number are based either in other U.S. states or internationally. Out of 202 employees, 77% are US-based in 19 states and 23% are based abroad in 19 countries. Combine the remote employees in the U.S. and abroad, I wouldn't be surprised if close to half of staff are based remotely. On engineering teams especially, it's not uncommon for a majority of employees to be remote.

Hello, On Tue, Apr 7, 2015 at 10:07 PM, Aleksey Bilogur <aleksey.bilogur(a)gmail.com> wrote: I don't think it's that clear-cut. A large part of the Product & Engineering staff is already working remotely, so they wouldn't be affected by the change. Many SF-based staffers also work remotely some of the time, and there are constant efforts being made to make the organization more remote-friendly; it wouldn't be a stretch to become a remote-first organization, to split to smaller offices, to relocate entirely, or all of the above. Some WMF employees followed the WMF from St Petersburg, FL to San Francisco during the 2007 relocation. I expect that this would also happen to some extent if the WMF were to relocate and/or split to smaller distributed offices. San Francisco isn't just expensive for the WMF; it's expensive for employees as well, and some of them may find it beneficial to move to a less expensive area, especially as they start families. In addition to the insanely high cost of living in the San Francisco area, there are other reasons that make relocation a viable long-term solution. The main that come to mind are geological instability (the bay area /will/ be struck by major earthquakes in the medium term) and ecological conditions (i.e. the multi-year drought and its anticipated socio-ecological consequences). Planning for continuity means taking these concerns into account in any medium- and long-term strategy thinking. As Oliver mentioned, an East-coast office could make sense in this context. Technical staff is somewhat distributed around the globe, but in contrast the head (leadership) and backbone (finance, admin and HR) of the WMF is concentrated in the San Francisco office. In the current situation, it would take months or years to recover from a major disaster. Transitioning to several (2+) smaller, distributed offices would make the organization a lot more resilient, geographically and functionally. All this to say: it is possible, even probably desirable, for the WMF to consider relocating out of the Bay Area in the long term (in whole or in part), so entertaining the idea is a valid train of thought. -- Guillaume Paumier (volunteer capacity) https://guillaumepaumier.com This is a mailing list-only e-mail address. Direct messages may go unnoticed.

On Wed, Apr 8, 2015 at 3:45 PM, Pine W <wiki.pine(a)gmail.com> wrote: Google, Microsoft and Facebook also have the vast majority of their employees working in the Pacific Northwest. I don't think recruiting and location strategy is a topic particularly amenable to amateur input. The management of the WMF is not an element of the movement that is crowdsourced, probably for good reason. Not that anyone with great confidence in their opinion should refrain from offering it, but hopefully no one will be upset when the WMF makes its own decision.

Hi Pine, If the Foundation decides to move, the cost of making the space usable for our staff is not a recoverable cost from the building owner. At this point, WMF is not planning on moving out of the San Francisco market area. We will be doing our best to manage cost when we renew our lease or move. The advantages of having good access to talented people and organizations WMF interacts with far outweigh any advantages to moving to a lower cost location outside of the San Francisco market area. Regards, Garfield On Tue, Apr 7, 2015 at 9:58 PM, Pine W &lt;wiki.pine(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: -- Garfield Byrd Chief of Finance and Administration Wikimedia Foundation 415.839.6885 ext 6787 415.882.0495 (fax) www.wikimediafoundation.org Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge. Help us make it a reality! *https://donate.wikimedia.org <https://donate.wikimedia.org/>*

On 9 April 2015 at 01:16, Garfield Byrd &lt;gbyrd(a)wikimedia.org&gt; wrote: I find the world-view expressed here slightly odd to read, perhaps because I am more European than American in background. My background includes working for long periods with many companies in the U.S. (such as Microsoft) and we managed to do that perfectly with a handful of employees in a Seattle office, and most developers and internal operations such as HR, finance etc. in Europe (very few of these people ever had a need or desire to talk directly with customers or partner organizations). It was easy enough for me to visit the U.S. a couple of times a year when there was a lot going on there, and work on a daily basis within a lively virtual team spread out in offices across London, Paris and New York. "Talented people" can be found in many places including San Francisco, and though Google is incredibly important, there many other critically important potential open knowledge partners without headquarters in SF (Europeana springs to mind). Even Mozilla has a very nice office to work with here in London. The idea that having all functions in SF has advantages that "far outweigh" all other considerations seems to over-egg the case, perhaps it would be a good thing to leave the door open a crack for alternative ways of working to be possible in a far future. Fae

Hi Fae, We have 215 staff in total, with a hub of activity in San Francisco and other staff in several other states and 18 countries. So I agree talented people can be found globally and WMF does hire the best talent it can find wherever they are located. At this point adding offices in other locations add cost without any benefits to the community or the Wikimedia Foundation. We also do not have the luxury of Mozilla's $300 million budget that can support a London office or Microsoft's billions to have a globally distributed workforce with offices. So we are not closing the door to anything. Based on our test project of trying to develop centers of activity in other parts of the United States there is no need for additional offices. We do need and will continue to hire a globally distributed staff of talented people to support our global community of talented volunteers. Regards, Garfield On Thu, Apr 9, 2015 at 2:19 AM, Fæ &lt;faewik(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: -- Garfield Byrd Chief of Finance and Administration Wikimedia Foundation 415.839.6885 ext 6787 415.882.0495 (fax) www.wikimediafoundation.org Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge. Help us make it a reality! *https://donate.wikimedia.org <https://donate.wikimedia.org/>*

All -- As a matter of strategy we should be leveraging our open-source roots more as we grow. This means distributed, loosely-coupled teams. We know from software industry history that distributed teams work best when they are *entirely* distributed. We are working on some structures that will allow teams to either be entirely distributed or mostly co-located, consistent with what we know about best outcomes. In SF, remote working is not very common as the software companies demand people to be on-site and we have an advantage with remote talent, but it is also not for everyone as it can be isolating. Net-net.. before we worry about growth and costs we need to worry about effectiveness, but we are thinking about this. Thanks, Lila On Thu, Apr 9, 2015 at 9:02 AM, Fæ &lt;faewik(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote:

Interesting. I look forward to seeing these new structures. Thanks Lila. Pine On Apr 9, 2015 1:53 PM, "Lila Tretikov" &lt;lila(a)wikimedia.org&gt; wrote:

Hi Garfield, many thanks for your answer! On Apr 9, 2015 5:35 PM, "Garfield Byrd" &lt;gbyrd(a)wikimedia.org&gt; wrote: functions earthquake? showed have office It creates To create less headaches about this would it not be better to split up wmf in two, one doing the software at any convenient location, while the other one would own the domains, hosting and money? our and to a cost http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/8/8a/RFP_for_Real_Estate_S… office for market have this https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines <mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe>

On 15/04/15 22:45, Craig Franklin wrote: 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

On Apr 17, 2015 4:15 AM, "Tim Starling" &lt;tstarling(a)wikimedia.org&gt; wrote: the St. 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

On Fri, Apr 17, 2015 at 5:13 AM, rupert THURNER &lt;rupert.thurner(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: Might I suggest, then, that you're not very familiar with open source software. The basis of modern UNIX is BSD, and its related free license, out of Berkeley, California. Add to that the output of major firms like Sun Microsystems (Java) and Google (Android) for their contributions to the FLOSS landscape, and it's hard to find anywhere else in the world with more impact. Poisons? Too odd to merit a response.

On 15-04-17 05:13 AM, rupert THURNER wrote: I'm sorry - what? I have no abundance of love towards the US society or its government as a rule, but that's not a mere generalization - it's a poor caricature. I can probably name a dozen American "brilliant persons" whose contributions have permanently shaped the FLOSS landscape - hell, created the movement - without even doing any research or thinking hard. Berkley and MIT are the birthplaces of the Hacker culture and - last I checked - they were American institutions. And even if your gloss were true, "get rich with his own company" is hardly mutually exclusive with FLOSS. -- Marc

The WMF will become a truly global organization when a Wikimedia US chapter is founded ;-) Il 08/04/2015 06:58, Pine W ha scritto: