[Foundation-l] Update of Foundation organization

[Gregory Maxwell]

On 3/5/07, Oldak Quill <oldakquill at gmail.com> wrote:
[snip
> If a volunteer strongly believes in the work of the foundation, has
> shown commitment to the project through positions of trust, has shown
> that they will do at least X hours a day, and has assumed much
> responsibility then I think they could be trusted with a position.

Even so, it's hard to put in what you'd like to put in when you have
another full-time obligation.

There are some volunteers whom have been able to volunteer for
Wikimedia without other full time obligations, but they are few and
far between and are not a scalable solution for our needs.

Furthermore, 40 people spending an hour to solve one problem is not
equal to 1 person spending 40 hours.  40 people have the advantage of
a broader perspective, but they fail in almost every other regard. A
great many problems would be far better solved with 40 people for 10
minutes and one person for 20 hours....

Time input vs results for complex tasks is non-linear and I suspect
that the majority of our long term volunteers don't put in enough time
to get out of the you-lose section of the curve.   This might explain
the over abundance we have in people doing patrolling for obvious
vandalism vs more complex 'quality checking' work like sourcing.

> I agree, there are some critical jobs with time-sensitivity that
> cannot be left to volunteers, but volunteers should be used as
> extensively as possible.

I think everyone would agree on that last point. We might just
disagree where the tradeoff point for volunteers is...