On 22 August 2012 20:34, Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton@gmail.com> wrote:
On 22 August 2012 20:18, Thomas Morton <
morton.thomas@googlemail.com> wrote:
>> I'm not a involved in technology professionally, but I did handle most
>> of the tech work for WMUK's first fundraiser in 2009.
>
>
> Great! I've been trying to find someone able to give me a good overview of
> what exactly is needed (tech-wise) for the fundraiser to little effect. Any
> chance you could fill me in on what was/is needed?
and CSS and battling with CiviCRM to try and integrate them as well as
possible. We need something a little more sophisticated now, though
(actually, we needed something more sophisticated in 2009, but all we
had was me!).
Looking at it my view is that a) that's about 2 weeks work (10 days). So not insubstantial. But b) a lot of it is reusable for the future (i.e. maintenance is a good deal easier than initial development).
So it is probably worth contracting this task out this year.
In fact I would factor it out of the developer hire as it needs to be done this year, and we are not likely to hire anyone. But we do have a £30,000 budget for 2012 development...
> True, some aspects are hard to handle remotely. But, again, this gives us a
> tech resource to draw on and helps justify FTE in 2014.
>
> Realistically speaking; if you're paying £35K for a developer/manager (which
> is what the last job description was looking for) it's not a great use of
> his or her time to be fixing laptops :) If this is a major issue there are
> contract tech support services we could look into to fill this specific gap
> that would be more cost effective.
I think the best approach is to accept that you are paying an inflated
price at first so that you can get someone with the potential to be a
head of department once there is a department for them to head. In the
meantime, they can fix laptops!
But if there is a regular tech support demand then it's better just to employ a part time guy to do it.
Think about it this way; if you were hired in to be the first technical staff at a young charity, in a management role with hands on technical things to do, a budget and potential for expansion... and you are fixing laptops for an appreciable portion of your time it is de-motivating ("I was doing this 5 years ago...").
Companies often think this way (lets hire a top guy, and he can cover the whole gap whilst building a team); it's a bad use of funds and rarely works out well.
> So this just needs prioritising; not everything will get support - but that,
> again, is another data point.
Why prioritise? Why not do everything? We aren't short of money,
either as a chapter or as a movement. WMUK has a tendency to be afraid
to spend money. Not being wasteful is good, but our donors have given
us the money so we can use it. It's no good sitting in the bank.
Throwing money at a problem might work, but it's never the best solution. If that's what we want to do then fine; I'm perfectly OK with that. This is an alternate "bootstrapped" solution.
> This is a silly idea, as I said before, and we should forget about this for
> a moment. Focus on our own tech needs.
It's helpful for us to do work that benefits the global movement.
Obviously, it is of benefit to the movement, but it is also of benefit
to us politically. One of the main arguments Sue Gardner (WMF ED) was
making for chapters not fundraising was that they only do local work
while the WMF does global work. We need to show people that that isn't
true. (It never has been true, and it her conclusion didn't follow
anyway, but that's not the point!)
I agree; but I think this should be on our two year goals. Expecting someone to come in and work on MediaWiki is not going to work well. As I explained the last time working on a major project of this sort is non-trivial and you don't want to have someone who is being disturbed with "can you set up this mailing list", "the server is down!" or "my laptop is broken" queries.
As you note we need to make a good effort on this; and saying "we have a developer, he could write some MediaWiki code I am sure!" isn't going to work IMO. We need to liaise with WMF tech, figure out the projects we want to focus on (with detailed spec!) and make sure everyone is happy with the approach.
What I am trying to say is that you're casually tacking on a whole other full time job to the description :)
> I have considered everything I've been told so far about our own needs; and
> added on top of it my own experience in working this way. So I am confident
> one day per week is sufficient in the short term.
Does your experience not tell you that there is always something
important that needs doing that you didn't think of before? That is
certainly the case in my experience and I can't see why tech would be
any difference.
Of course; but this problem exists whether we hire a contractor or a full time employee.
I'm suggesting a short term solution to the technology gap. As we have found out hiring someone with several specialist capabilities and management experience is not workable; but you are quite likely to get someone more along these lines via contracting. Because we have to be versatile.
> In fact, companies almost always overestimate the tech time they need. This
> is because they see projects that might fill 4 days of work - and
> extrapolate that the developer is going to be BUSY. The truth is you get
> busy periods and lulls - and a good engineer will be able to manage time
> effectively to spread this out (for example; fundraiser might need lots of
> work, but if you start in May...).
We're not a for-profit company trying to do the bare minimum, though.
If we have extra capacity, we can do extra work, and that's good.
It would be nice to enumerate what this "extra work" is. Often companies say this; many years ago I started working at somewhere with a couple of specific projects and "lots of extra work once your here". There was very little of the latter in truth.
If we can identify "nice to have" projects then fine, I'll bow to this. But otherwise I am skeptical.
> What's the alternative? We can't find someone to do all the stuff we need at
> the budget we have set. And a FTE is certainly too much for our next years
> needs.
Then set a larger budget. As I've said, I disagree that we couldn't
make good use of a full time tech person. ("Needs" is actually the
wrong word - it doesn't matter what we need, what matters is what we
could do that would be worth the money.)
Well ok, I'm all for that. But it didn't seem to be getting great feedback on the ideas page (i.e. all out tech team budget) so I am offering an alternative to consider.
> The best approach is to bring in a minimum utility and work up from there;
> justifying a FTE for the 2014 budget will be MUCH easier if we can say "look
> at X specific things we didn't have time to do".
Then we'll continue having problems due to having too little tech
capacity for another year.
If you can get budget approval for a much increased tech budget, and hire them at the start of the year then go for it. I am skeptical but I will support the endeavour.
On the other hand this lightweight solution might tide us over :)
Tom