I can see why one would prefer having a single person in-house, though. In the long term,
it's likely to be cheaper, and people (be it the community, the board, or other staff)
have a named person they can go to with queries about technical things. A permanent member
of staff might also be more easily brought round to the Wikimedia way of thinking
(particularly wrt community involvement, doing things in the open, and freely licensing
their work).
That's not to say that I disagree with Tom or Charles, I'm mostly playing
devil's advocate (not least because I'm not technically competent enough to do
much more than facilitate discussion).
Harry
________________________________
From: Thomas Morton <morton.thomas(a)googlemail.com>
To: UK Wikimedia mailing list <wikimediauk-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
Sent: Monday, 18 June 2012, 15:41
Subject: Re: [Wikimediauk-l] Recruiting for the Developer
On 18 June 2012 15:28, Charles Matthews <charles.r.matthews(a)ntlworld.com> wrote:
On 18 June 2012 15:17, HJ Mitchell <hjmitchell(a)ymail.com> wrote:
I may be
wrong, but I suspect the idea is to aim high, hoping but not
expecting that somebody will apply who meets all the criteria, and failing
that, that we'll get somebody who meets most of the criteria and could pick
up or be trained in the the skills they need.
I don't think you're wrong about that. The "debate so far" has mostly
been in terms of "it would be nice if" or "we are in the business of
getting into that business" or other such aspirational stuff.
I'm actually going on my experience of being recruited to do WMUK's
admin, six months after it should have been clear that WMUK needed at
least a half-time person, at 12 hours a week. Discussions I had after
the interview turned out to be utterly fruitless. There were reasons
for that, but in any case I completely failed to professionalise WMUK
as the first hire, which should have been on the job description.
No amount of corporate jargon and/or penny-pinching can cover up not
getting the right person for the job because the position is a vaguish
proposition. So I think Tom has a point.
This is right.
One of my experiences in around the last 18 months is that smaller companies (which we
are, lets face it) start out contracting technical work because it is significantly
cheaper. We've identified several areas of experience we need:
* PHP development
* Virtual server sysadmin
* SSL (a specific experience in itself!)
* Experience with finance/taking money (again; something quite specific)
* Security reivew
* Project management
* Advocacy
If we have a budget of £29K to spend on people doing this then hiring one person is far
from optimal. Anyone you find will lack requisite experience in any one of these, which
means our objectives won't be met.
On the other hand you have a major asset in that several community members do have this
experience - and might be interested in a robust volunteer driven model.
Contracting the specific expertise needed, whilst developing a robust community department
is an excellent model :)
Tom
_______________________________________________
Wikimedia UK mailing list
wikimediauk-l(a)wikimedia.org
http://mail.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediauk-l
WMUK:
http://uk.wikimedia.org