I am pretty certain that nobody doubts how hard we work in the office but
part of our job will be to make sure people understand what we are doing
and delivering.
As Fae says there is a weekly report to the board which covers the twenty
or thirty key events of the week. To be useful this contains a lot of
detail that is personal or involving third parties so it is not appropriate
for public dissemination.
WMUK works like any charity (or employer). I have regular meetings with the
Chair, and the staff have them with me where we go through their work
patterns and priorities.
It is my job to deliver the programme agreed by the community through the
board and manage the staff accordingly. This is an ambitious programme and
with only four staff supporting the volunteers time is a very precious
commodity. There are also competing demands from different projects and
this needs balancing.
I would be loathe to add hours of staff time writing work diaries. (I also
think this could be patronising and demotivating.)
The biggest problem is avoiding burn-out. Our contracts expect us to work
35 hours a week but in reality we tend to be on duty seven days a week with
a lot of evening and weekend activities. I rarely work less than 50 hours
plus checking and replying to texts and emails at other times.
I am sure we have really talented and dedicated staff and am keen to show
the community what they are achieving.
- They are often seen at wikimeets and events
- Visitors to the office meet them
- They are active on the lists
- They respond to calls, texts and emails
But not everyone goes to wikimeets or reads the lists.
That is why, as part of the ongoing communications review, I am looking for
ways to keep volunteers, members and supporters better informed.
This could involve more blog posts from the staff, 'my diary' postings to
our webpages, regular IRC's etc.
Feed your ideas into the review
http://uk.wikimedia.org/wiki/2012_Communications_Review
Jon
PS To give you some idea reading the emails about this, thinking about
them, talking to staff and writing this email has taken approximately 43
minutes. or (at least in theory 2% of my working week)
On Sun, May 6, 2012 at 11:15 PM, Fae <faenwp(a)gmail.com> wrote:
As a trustee with a duty to monitor rather than
direct, I'm interested in
necessary, accurate and easy to consume reporting. The Board needs to know
that our investment in staff and office is well spent. Jon and I have
talked about the option of one-page dashboard style reports that might be
maintained publicly on-wiki so everyone can get an idea what is going on.
At the moment we have an "office" wiki where staff and board can see loads
of (mostly rather dull) stuff including the weekly one-page operations
report which Jon calls the Chief Exec report. It contains some detail we
ought to keep confidential such as exactly who has been part of what
meetings (for example, it says that Edward Buckner came in for a friendly
chat last week with generally positive results, but I hope you realize that
I would not tell you all that on a public list unless Edward had written
about the experience himself in another public place) and how many bids we
have had for the Train the Trainers requirement. However, I see no reason
to avoid being open about the non-confidential stuff and our most eager
critics may be just the right people to find new angles on hard problems.
It is important that any reporting does not become a massive burden
compared to its value, but simple reporting of key metrics, necessary
tracking of risks and issues and progress to plan might be the sort of
things to make public so our widest possible community can review and
contribute early to opportunities for improvement based on the best "live"
data on the weekly and monthly level. Stevie had some ideas about what a
one-screen full Operations page on our wiki might contain (including our
live IRC channel as part of a mash-up to keep it interesting?).
This coming week we are all going to be committed to having a great
WikiConference UK, but this would be a useful topic to kick about and think
of pragmatic ways of doing it, and for Jon to pick up on in a couple more
weeks. Please, however, try to be kind to the lovely staff we have with
their fragile egos, and keep your expectations realistic for the small but
smart organization we believe we all are part of.
I can assure you they are not sitting around drinking tea from Wiki mugs
editing articles about celebritards. Apart from lunch times. ;-)
Cheers,
Fae
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