Dear Jon, Daria, Stevie and Richard Hope this doesn't sound like too much of a silly question, but I would love to know what you guys do throughout the week :) I dont just mean like on average. But I would love to be able to see what projects staff are working on, how projects are progressing etc. I suppose not just to be interesting but it would be great to build on the transparency that we have institutionalised into our board. I would love to get the same or at least closer level of openness with our staff. I think the community would appreciate that openess too and also it helps us better understand the roles our staff play :) Right now although I know all your job titles, and we have job descriptions. I have seen from my own eyes at the foundation that they don't necessarily reflect on what a person is actually doing. I would be interested in knowing how much time they are spending on different things, as well as what things they are doing. This in particular applies to managing budgets since we should really measure the cost of our staff time to allow us to monitor accurately what is actually getting spent where. Anyway it would good to hear your thoughts on not just what you guys are up to at the moment, but also what is feasible for you guys to do to be able to feed this kind of info back to the community in the long term. ThanksSeddon
+1
By my reckoning, there is something like 160 person-hours of work being done in the office every week. I would love to know what that work actually is!
On 5 May 2012 23:08, joseph seddon life_is_bitter_sweet@hotmail.co.uk wrote:
Dear Jon, Daria, Stevie and Richard
Hope this doesn't sound like too much of a silly question, but I would love to know what you guys do throughout the week :) I dont just mean like on average. But I would love to be able to see what projects staff are working on, how projects are progressing etc. I suppose not just to be interesting but it would be great to build on the transparency that we have institutionalised into our board. I would love to get the same or at least closer level of openness with our staff. I think the community would appreciate that openess too and also it helps us better understand the roles our staff play :) Right now although I know all your job titles, and we have job descriptions. I have seen from my own eyes at the foundation that they don't necessarily reflect on what a person is actually doing. I would be interested in knowing how much time they are spending on different things, as well as what things they are doing. This in particular applies to managing budgets since we should really measure the cost of our staff time to allow us to monitor accurately what is actually getting spent where.
Anyway it would good to hear your thoughts on not just what you guys are up to at the moment, but also what is feasible for you guys to do to be able to feed this kind of info back to the community in the long term.
Thanks Seddon
Wikimedia UK mailing list wikimediauk-l@wikimedia.org http://mail.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediauk-l WMUK: http://uk.wikimedia.org
On 05/05/12 23:10, Thomas Dalton wrote:
By my reckoning, there is something like 160 person-hours of work being done in the office every week. I would love to know what that work actually is!
I was invited into the office, I spoke to staff, and I was given a mug. That all takes time, you know!
Gordo
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
On 6 May 2012 23:15, Fae faenwp@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. [snip] It is important that any reporting does not become a massive burden compared to its value
Hopefully, we can find a way for the staff to provide you with what you need to know to fulfil your duties as a trustee that can very easily be used to also keep the community informed about what is happening. Hopefully the amount that will need redacting will be very small, so it shouldn't be too much work.
In order to correctly budget for different projects and monitor their effectiveness, there needs to be some monitoring of how much time the staff are spending on different things. That should be very easy to just publish on the wiki - it should be very rare for the staff to be working on something so secret that even their timesheet would need more than minimal redaction. Even if it is too much work to write detailed reports about what they're doing (we do need to leave them a little time for actually doing their jobs!), it would be useful to at least know what they are spending time on.
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@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
Wikimedia UK mailing list wikimediauk-l@wikimedia.org http://mail.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediauk-l WMUK: http://uk.wikimedia.org
On 8 May 2012 10:40, Jon Davies jon.davies@wikimedia.org.uk wrote:
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.
I'll chip in with the comment that I think Board members have consistently (in my experience) underestimated the administrative effort required to get things done, in the past. And that's with an informed view: probably chapter members in general have much less to go on. There's a large backlog of things round the chapter that ought to be in place but aren't yet.
Charles
On 8 May 2012 10:40, Jon Davies jon.davies@wikimedia.org.uk wrote:
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.
Indeed, I haven't heard anyone doubt that you are working hard. The question is just regarding what you are working hard on.
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.
How much work would it be to redact the confidential parts so it can be published? If it can be done without an unreasonable amount of extra work, it would be a good thing to do.
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.)
I agree, full blown work diaries probably isn't a good option (at my work we have all sorts of compliance requirements that means it can sometimes end up taking longer to document what you've done that it actually took to do - you definitely don't want to end up in that position!). Simple timesheets wouldn't be too much work to fill out, though, and would be useful both for communicating what you are doing to the community and for monitoring project budgets (at the moment, I don't think staff time is included in the budgets for projects, but it really should be - for a lot of projects, it will be the main expenditure).
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.
Yes, whatever system is implemented needs to be one that doesn't take up too much time. I'm sure a system can be devised that meets our needs without being an unreasonable drain on your valuable time.
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
Those all sound like good ideas, but there is something to be said for the community having some idea of the day-to-day activities of the staff and not just the bits that are interesting enough to blog about or hold IRC conversations about. I suspect the interesting bits will be things we already know about, but it's important for the community not to underestimate the importance of all the stuff you do behind the scenes to keep everything running smoothly.
On 06/05/12 23:15, Fae wrote:
(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)
Is friendly chats with random members of the community an objective? I myself have enjoyed a chat in the office with staff, and I got some swag as well...
Gordo
On Tue, May 8, 2012 at 12:38 PM, Gordon Joly gordon.joly@pobox.com wrote:
On 06/05/12 23:15, Fae wrote:
(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)
Is friendly chats with random members of the community an objective? I myself have enjoyed a chat in the office with staff, and I got some swag as well...
It's important staff get to know the community, this is often accomplished better by a friendly chat than an unfriendly interrogation. ;-)
Chris
On Tue, May 8, 2012 at 12:42 PM, Gordon Joly gordon.joly@pobox.com wrote:
On 08/05/12 12:40, Chris Keating wrote:
It's important staff get to know the community, this is often accomplished better by a friendly chat than an unfriendly interrogation. ;-)
Chris
Which community?
IDK, which one did you mean when you said: "Is friendly chats with random members of the community an objective? "
We may be talking at cross purposes.
The UK community - both members and non-members :-)
Richard Symonds Wikimedia UK 0207 065 0992 Disclaimer viewable at http://uk.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia:Email_disclaimer Visit http://www.wikimedia.org.uk/ and @wikimediauk
On 8 May 2012 12:42, Gordon Joly gordon.joly@pobox.com wrote:
On 08/05/12 12:40, Chris Keating wrote:
It's important staff get to know the community, this is often accomplished better by a friendly chat than an unfriendly interrogation. ;-)
Chris
Which community?
Gordo
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On 8 May 2012 12:50, Richard Symonds richard.symonds@wikimedia.org.uk wrote:
The UK community - both members and non-members :-)
Getting to know the international community wouldn't hurt either - I know Jon has visited both Berlin and San Fransisco in order to get to know people. Hopefully those trips will just be the start of a long-term culture of maintaining strong relations with our international partners.
On Tue, May 8, 2012 at 12:52 PM, Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton@gmail.comwrote:
On 8 May 2012 12:50, Richard Symonds richard.symonds@wikimedia.org.uk wrote:
The UK community - both members and non-members :-)
Getting to know the international community wouldn't hurt either - I know Jon has visited both Berlin and San Fransisco in order to get to know people. Hopefully those trips will just be the start of a long-term culture of maintaining strong relations with our international partners.
I can just feel that "define which community you mean" is going to result in email threads as long as the ones about which operating systems we should use.....
Well, that is a small group and a much bigger group. The small group might just fit into the office, but the bigger one would not!
:-)
Gordon
On 08/05/12 12:50, Richard Symonds wrote:
The UK community - both members and non-members :-)
Richard Symonds Wikimedia UK 0207 065 0992 Disclaimer viewable athttp://uk.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia:Email_disclaimer Visit http://www.wikimedia.org.uk/ and @wikimediauk
On 8 May 2012 12:42, Gordon Joly <gordon.joly@pobox.com mailto:gordon.joly@pobox.com> wrote:
On 08/05/12 12:40, Chris Keating wrote: It's important staff get to know the community, this is often accomplished better by a friendly chat than an unfriendly interrogation. ;-) Chris Which community? Gordo _______________________________________________ Wikimedia UK mailing list wikimediauk-l@wikimedia.org <mailto:wikimediauk-l@wikimedia.org> http://mail.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediauk-l WMUK: http://uk.wikimedia.org
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