Re: [Wikimediauk-l] Wikimedia UK policy updates - consultation

Hi Lucy, I've added a few comments to the google docs - sorry for not quite meeting your deadline. I see that the new volunteers policy removes a key phrase that was often used in WMUK's past: "staff should only do things that volunteers either cannot do or do not want to do". That's OK - perhaps that phrase has now outlived its usefulness - but it might be useful to recall why that phrase started being used. Caveat that my memory has faded over the years, so if other have a different recollection then please share it! Back then, we were starting to hire a number of new positions for the first time, working in areas that at the time were dominated by volunteer work (particularly GLAM, but also other outreach approaches), and we were worried that the staff might displace/discourage volunteers from contributing to those areas. That's not scalable, as there are always going to be a limited number of staff and a much larger base of volunteers, so it's much more effective for staff to support volunteers rather than trying to replace them. When we hired the new staff members we tried to focus them on being enablers that would scale up volunteer activity rather than replace it (e.g., coordination roles). Sadly, I think that worry was realised anyway, and staff did displace volunteer work in, e.g., talking to potential partners, at a time when there were still volunteers willing to do that work but they just weren't being invited to do so. I think that's part of what then led WMUK to become so London-centric, as that's where its staff was, even though its volunteers were distributed much more widely. Things have changed quite a bit since then, but I hope that the principle (if not the phrase) survives in WMUK's approach to engaging volunteers, and leveraging its staff capacity to make the biggest possible impact. Thanks, Mike