On 18 June 2012 17:48, Thomas Dalton
<thomas.dalton@gmail.com> wrote:
On 18 June 2012 15:41, Thomas Morton <
morton.thomas@googlemail.com> wrote:
> 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.
speaking contractors are a lot more expensive than salaried staff
because you have to compensate them for the lack of job security.
To an extent. However you'll stand a higher chance of getting people to lower their rates for the fact it is Wikipedia :)
Also; whilst a salaried staff member will cost less for the same # of hours, specialist contract work will tend to require less hours. You won't find someone who can do good PHP development work and also a proper security audit for this price point. But you could certainly hire contractors within this budget.
Contractors are good if it's a temporary position or if you think it
might be a temporary position, so you're willing to pay a premium not
to be stuck with someone after the work is done.
Contractors are good for fixed-term specialist work. Things like sorting out SSL and security auditing fit these. As do most of the development projects discussed.
WMUK is going to need
a tech person permanently, so should hire an employee.
My big concern here is that this is a "rush" decision that no one has taken a strategic look into. What is our aim for development in a year? Two years? Three years? Does it involve the community? What projects will we focus on.
Even known things are ill defined; QRpedia is regularly mentioned as a task.. but what is the status of this project. Which of the original stakeholders are still involved, and are they going to hand over the development reigns? What work actually, specifically needs doing.
The only reason I can see that WMUK might want to hire a contractor is
if it is going to be a part-time role, which might be possible if we
could get volunteers to do the work. We haven't done particularly well
with getting volunteers to do the work so far, though, and I'm not
sure having someone coordinating the volunteers would actually result
in any more volunteers crawling out of the woodwork.
I'm not convinced that is an insurmountable problem if we specify the work. There are plenty of developers and tech types around - but I for one have no idea how to assist, and in the last ~18 months that I have been active I've not seen any particular requests for assisstance (apart from a couple of discussions about SSL which I tried my best to assist with).
But we've done quite well crowd sourcing things like software issues, choices of software and so forth on this list...
if you higher a dogsbody developer now, what role does he have if next year our strategic goal becomes "support a community development community".
There is also an
issue that a lot of WMUK's tech work will need to be done on a tight
deadline, which is where volunteers tend not to be the best choice.
Specifics?
This is the only real concern I'd agree with - but easily mitigated by finding a good contractor able to do this sort of work.
All I am saying is; is the hiring of a developer urgent to the extent that not hiring one in the next couple of months significantly sets us back?
If the answer is yes; how?
If the answer is no I'd suggest we work out a detailed strategic goal for development over the next few years and see what roles that requires.
For example; we have a budding MediWiki development community in the UK - and they may be interested in also contributing to WMUK projects if we offer them the umbrella of financial and office support... who knows? But as WMUK is here to help existing WM communities as much as start our own it seems a logical place to start?
Tom