Indeed we are! But allow me to play devil's advocate here: - How would you run HR meetings? Is it feasible to use videoconferencing? - What are the additional costs involved with this approach? Are there local taxes that would need administrating and paying? Would you need a HR team who can handle - Does it increase the WMF's liability if they have a permanent staff presence in another country (eg., EU data protection laws, or UK libel laws)? - What are the insurance implications of staff remote-working from (say) Ghana or India? - If employees from one country are entitled to certain privileges by law - eg paid paternity leave, or minimum break times - does that automatically get extended to others around the world? If not, will it create resentment between people who do the same job in different countries? I'm not offering an opinion on this either way, but these are important things to consider if there is going to be a change. 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 24 July 2013 15:10, Dimitar Parvanov Dimitrov < dimitar.parvanov.dimitrov(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote:

On Wed, Jul 24, 2013 at 11:37 AM, Federico Leva (Nemo) &lt;nemowiki(a)gmail.com&gt;wrote;wrote: As someone who moved to SF to work here, I could not disagree more. The amount of time and energy I save being near many of the people I work with closely in the same space is enormous. Not to mention the fact that many of us work better together with people we are able to see socially and so on. I could go on, but the truth is I think no one actually responsible for making such a decision is crazy enough to get rid of a central office. (Move the office? Maybe someday if we really are forced to. We've done it before. But get rid of a central office? No.)

Erik, if the WMF is supposed to be a global organization there is no need to concentrate all (physical) resources in SF, unless the WMF is acting as the US chapter, then it could be understood that it has to restrict its geographic presence. As I see it, for example there is no impedement to have a WMF Asia in any chosen country of that region with an engineering department dependent on the WMF. I would like to hear from the legal team what are the challenges of having a distributed presence. It is not a new problem, many international organizations and companies have gone through the process, so there should be no need to invent new solutions. As you say, there is international staff already, the only thing missing would be a space to attract even more talent while keeping the costs down. Not everyone wants to work from home. Obviuously an external assessment would be necessary to establish what is the size necessary for that to happen and if the benefits outweight the costs. As for chapters building engineering capacity I see it as something positive, unfortunately only at the reach of the biggest chapters, and with a very local (contry-level) organizational focus, which doesn't help in creating an international work environement. Micru On Wed, Jul 24, 2013 at 12:30 PM, Erik Moeller &lt;erik(a)wikimedia.org&gt; wrote: -- Etiamsi omnes, ego non

Nathan, you are wrong in shifting to me the burden of proof. The budget states that there are rising costs associated with the current location. That doesn't mean that the slots are going unfulfilled, it is always possible to raise salaries or "import" workers. But is this the best strategy? Have other strategies been considered? The 2013-14 plan, page 26, says: "Nearly half of the Wikimedia Foundation engineering/product team is not based in the San Francisco Bay Area, so we're operating with the flexibility to hire people where they are, supporting them in making the shift to work at the central location if they're willing to do it and it makes sense for a given position. This gives us increased flexibility in recruiting and hiring." Given that situation, would it make sense to look for answers to your questions? Because what you are asking needs a degree of analysis that only an external organisation could provide, not only a person, whatever experience they claim to have. Micru On Wed, Jul 24, 2013 at 3:01 PM, Nathan &lt;nawrich(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: -- Etiamsi omnes, ego non

Is WMF planning to outsource any of its engineering activities in the future? Or are there enough projects in the queue that makes the effort reasonable? Otherwise I believe there is no point for any chapter to build out any software engineering capacity above their local needs or at all. Balázs 2013/7/24 Erik Moeller &lt;erik(a)wikimedia.org&gt;

If WMF is serious about letting development activities grow in other countries this might be taken into account in FDCs allocation policy. Last year Wmch offered to pay one additional developper for wikidata. It was refused because of "too much growth". For wmch this would have been just money flow while the person would have been managed by wmde's existing project team. For donors in Switzerland such a contribution would be easy to communicate. Much easier to communicate than 400000 instead of 300000 went as contribution to WMFs 30 mio budget. Rupert Am 24.07.2013 22:56 schrieb "Balázs Viczián" &lt;balazs.viczian(a)wikimedia.hu&gt;hu>:

Le 2013-07-26 04:23, Everton Zanella Alvarenga a écrit : Can you provide some relevant links on this subject, please? Could you be more explicit, please? What do you mean? -- Association Culture-Libre http://www.culture-libre.org/

Well, both Hungary and Budapest aims to be the R&D center of the region. There are multiple government and munipal funds and programmes plus a lot of favouring policies on both administrative levels, including a full dedicated neighbourhood on the bank of the Danube, named Infopark (since 1996 [1]) Setting up a formally for-profit company who's only contractor would be the WMF (and/or other chapters) in BP can be funded well over 50% from non movement funds (or low/no interest loans) during the first few years and would be much much cheaper than any parts of Western Europe and most of the CEE. Doing so though WMHU or a separate non-profit way - probaly also doable. However having one such department for the sake of having one is a total waste of time, money and efforts everywhere in the World, so the main question is: are there enough projects that could make establishing such a department/spearate entity reasonable? Balázs [1] http://www.infopark.hu/lang/en/

Hi Erik (and whomever from WMDE), For the benefit of chapters that are interested in this space, can you offer any examples of projects that are of an appropriate size and type for a chapter to take on? I think that most chapters* would be willing to help out in the software development space if we got a bit of direction on how we could be the most useful. Cheers, Craig Franklin * Keeping in mind that my chapter probably wouldn't have the capacity to start anything in this space for at least another twelve months. On 27 July 2013 09:57, Erik Moeller &lt;erik(a)wikimedia.org&gt; wrote:

On Sun, Jul 28, 2013 at 12:31 AM, Erik Moeller &lt;erik(a)wikimedia.org&gt; wrote: On this topic, one thing that was brought up in the Board elections questions & answers was the (ongoing) need to triage feature requests by the community, including especially requests for features from experienced & admin users, and feature requests from the sister projects. One of the ideas in the candidate answers was to focus more on building a central place where feature requests (and cool existing tools) can be shared between language editions and projects, and where feature ideas could get refined outside of bugzilla & the lists; another idea was to build a kind of technical committee to help collect and refine these ideas. Then of course there is the actual technical work of addressing these requests. I don't know if working on this would fit in with what any of the chapters are doing, but it does seem like a social/technical/community area that could use some energy. best, -- phoebe -- * I use this address for lists; send personal messages to phoebe.ayers <at> gmail.com *

Subject: was Re: About the concentration of resources in SF (it was: "Communication plans for community engagement") Let me start off by saying: Different chapters, thematic orgs, etc. have different levels of tech expertise, and there is enough work for everyone to have some if they want. :-) People who are experts in reading, editing, proofreading, uploading, teaching, etc. with Wikimedia sites can help by pairing with developers to mentor interns, and can test proposed changes to see if they work. People who are interested in dabbling a little and learning some of the technical side can sponsor audits, do community liaison work via <https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-ambassadors>, and gather information about needed functionality to advise on products <https://blog.wikimedia.org/2012/11/21/lead-development-process-product-adviser-manager/>. People who can code a little bit can improve, translate, and port gadgets and bots and Lua templates, or even fix bugs in MediaWiki, and then move on to one of the "mentored projects" ideas as a next step. And groups with a lot of technical expertise can follow Wikimedia Germany's example with a big project like Wikidata. All of these are ways to make a difference. On 07/28/2013 03:31 AM, Erik Moeller wrote http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimedia-l/2013-July/127237.html : ... Quim and others have continued talking about the specifics of using mentored projects as a place for Wikimedia organizations (chapters, thematic organizations, etc.) to start. Quim, on the mentorship project ideas http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Mentorship_programs/Possible_projects : I agree! And I'd love to see this happen. But that's not the only way. I want to go back to Erik's idea and think about diversifying the whole software development process. I'd love to see chapters, thematic orgs, and other Wikimedia organizations helping get diverse voices and talents involved in information-gathering, in improving our plans about what to build, in testing prototypes to make sure the delivered software suits the needs of the movement, and so on. For instance, check out <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Accessibility#People_and_organizations_working_on_MediaWiki_accessibility> . It's helpful that WMDE is currently contracting with Marius Hoch, who is fixing accessibility-related bugs. But it has also been useful (in my opinion) for all the other people in that list -- from WMIT, WMDC, WMDE, WMFR, and others -- to hold workshops, fund and manage audits, write guides, and so on! All of these have helped make our sites more accessible. Similarly, what WMUK plans to do with Wikimania next year <https://wikimania2014.wikimedia.org/wiki/Outreach> -- reaching out to larger tech communities and bringing them to Wikimania, cross-pollinating us all together -- will help the movement's tech progress. It'll be great to have more opendata/bigdata and design experts reusing our work, suggesting improvements, and perhaps joining us longterm. Phoebe wrote: Check out the notes from the Engineering Community Team's Wikimania session https://wikimania2013.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Submissions/Transparency_and_… to see some ideas of where this is already happening -- Quim also talked about that in this thread -- and how we're encouraging people to participate. Our team's happy to help guide people who want to learn how to do this kind of liaising, triaging, and sharing. Daniel Mietchen discussed porting and maintaining tools like Citation bot: ... to which John Vandenberg replied: I believe Silke Meyer of WMDE is the best person to speak definitively about this so I'll defer to her. But yes, I would love for more Wikimedia organizations to customize, maintain, port, translate, and otherwise improve bots, tools, and gadgets. Here are some instructions regarding documenting, localising and porting templates and gadgets -- written by one of our past OPW interns: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/File:Extension_cite.pdf https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/File:Documenting_noteworthy_local_templates.… According to Arjuna Rao Chavala, https://wikimania2013.wikimedia.org/wiki/Submissions/Essentials_for_Nurturi… it's really helpful to smaller Wikipedias to help them adopt tools like HotCat and Twinkle and bots. Nemo wrote on Aug 24: Nemo, I'm glad you mentioned this problem. What do you think would be necessary in order to make future WMIT tech initiatives successful? Mentorship from more experienced IT project managers? Frequent check-ins to find dropped tasks faster? Paid contractors for engineering or administration? I'm just giving ideas - maybe you have an idea of what you would do, if you could do this over again. (And thank you for trying, and for talking about failure openly.) I hope this is helpful (though long!). And thanks to Markus Glaser and others who spoke with me at Wikimania to think through a lot of this. -- Sumana Harihareswara Engineering Community Manager Wikimedia Foundation

Sorry for double post; Erik's post below is useful to illustrate my point which I failed to communicate (<http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimedia-l/2013-September/128053.html>). Erik Moeller, 28/07/2013 09:31: I don't know if this is *the* way forward, but I think this proposal is an example of something that makes sense. Why? It defines a scope which works towards the goals and plans of all involved entities together (overlap) but is also under the control of each of them separately (accountability etc.). So, if e.g. WMF decides not to enable the new extension produced by an intern, at least the chapter can say it has successfully increased diversity in the developer community. Don't put all your eggs in one basket; especially if you're not holding it. Nemo

On Sun, Jul 28, 2013 at 8:05 PM, Daniel Mietchen < daniel.mietchen(a)googlemail.com&gt; wrote: Yes! From a user perspective, that's definitely an area of need, and a great example too. Personal note: I LOVE Citation Bot, and I hope it comes back soon! -- phoebe -- * I use this address for lists; send personal messages to phoebe.ayers <at> gmail.com *

On 07/28/2013 11:46 PM, John Vandenberg wrote: It's probably worth nothing that WMDE has, in fact, already earmarked staff (and a budget) to do the migration aspect of this. Silke Meyer (I think) heads that effort. On the other hand, there are a number of tools on which projects rely that -- even if they do not need help migrating at this moment -- could benefit from continued support. Perhaps the current efforts by the WMDE staff can be used as a model for how chapters can contribute on the engineering aspects of the projects? I'm sure they are gathering a great deal of experience in how to do this thanks to the migration efforts and the ongoing work on Wikidata. -- Marc

Actually we've been having this conversation a bit as part of our strategic planning process - how much should Wikimedia UK be doing technology and what place should it have in our long-term goals? After some debate we decided it was important enough to merit a top-level point of its own; http://uk.wikimedia.org/wiki/Towards_a_five_year_plan_2013-18/Draft_Goals_v… That said it's not something we are likely to make any big strides on in 2014. Chris