[Foundation-l] Update of Foundation organization

[Gregory Maxwell]

On 3/5/07, GerardM <gerard.meijssen at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hoi,
> An employee brings minimally as his/her commitment to work 40 hours a week.
> An employee can be told to do what is deemed necessary by the organisation.
> An employee is part of an hierarchy and he/she does not have the option to
> say "Sorry, but like you I am a volunteer".
>
> These are all things that are really relevant differences. Strange that I
> did not have to think hard nor long to come up with just this initial list.
> When I think of it, a professional can be hired to do the things where we do
> not have the volunteers to do these tasks.

Tying in the "hire vs volunteer" and the "hire outside the US" issues...

GerardM is on the money with respect to the values of hiring people.

Of course, this results in one of the problem we have hiring people...
The roles we need to hire the most are often the ones that do the jobs
that our existing volunteers do the poorest... so that makes hiring
first from the volunteer pool more of a challenge.

When we talk about hiring people from outside of the US, but when we
are not talking about hiring from the volunteer pool, what we're
talking about is effectively outsourcing, or at least it  could be
seen that way by the huge portion of our our editing pool and donors
which are in the US (which is the majority, at least to a first order
approximation, based on donated currency and edit counts).  So thats
another area to be sensitive about... Despite low and declining
performance in the sciences, the US still regards itself as an
intellectual powerhouse, and hiring a lot of knowledge workers outside
of the US for reasons outside community involvement (er.. i.e. pay
scale) may not settle to well with some.

Though I think this factor far less important than the jurisdiction
issues. But it's perhaps an interesting point, cultural sensitivity
has to work in all directions.