[Foundation-l] LA Times article / Advertising in Wikipedia

[Brion Vibber]

Delirium wrote:
> Robert Rohde wrote:
>> Even within the realm of simply running the site, there is a big difference
>> between running Wikimedia with a couple paid developers and a bunch of
>> volunteers, and really having a professional development staff.  How many
>> software features have been promised (e.g. stable versions, universal login,
>> etc.) that have been delayed for a very long time for lack of resources,
>> especially developer time?  Do you want just enough money to run the site,
>> or do you want enough money to grow and build Mediawiki's feature set, etc.?
> 
> 
> Is that what's happening, though? According to the staff list [1], 
> despite the general staff expansion, no new technical staff has been 
> added since 2006: We're still at 2 full-time and 2 part-time/contract 
> staff, out of 13 full-time and 15 total paid staff members. So the money 
> does seem to be being used for staff expansion, but not staff who are 
> going to implement single-login or add MediaWiki features.

We're currently in the process of hiring our first new full-time 
developer here in San Francisco, with a second planned in the next few 
months.


For some historical perspective, the priorities of new hiring over the 
last year or so have been roughly:

1) People we need to keep the company running, so we stay out of chaos:
- accounting
- legal
- communication

2) People we need to bring in more money, so we can expand:
- fundraising
- business development
- grants and partnerships

The above two categories included new people in St Pete, people to 
replace the people who didn't move with us to San Francisco, and new 
people in San Francisco.

3) People we need to move forward more effectively on the technical front:
- data center tech (Rob)
- system administration (Mark, Rob)
- programming (some contract workers, the new full-time position 
currently in process of hiring, the next one in a few months)

Rob's full-time and does a lot of system administration and other work 
that his predecessors as part-time data center techs never did. We've 
been doing some project-driven contracting on several projects 
(fundraising site, flagged revisions, various other projects).


-- brion vibber (brion @ wikimedia.org)