[Wikimedia-l] Wikimedia Organizations First Employee Study

[Jessie Wild]

Hello!

Just wanted to give a brief update on a piece of analysis recently posted
regarding the* first employee hiring of Wikimedia organizations*. For those
who contributed, *THANK YOU* for your participation!

The main information can be on found on meta:
* Background of information[1]
* Survey results[2]

Though a very small sample set, the main takeaways of the survey are:

   - Organizations tend to hire in one of two scenarios: (a) there is a
   particular activity that needs to occur which is* time-sensitive* and
   hard to manage via volunteers (events, partnerships); (b) the
amount of *administrative
   work* required to maintain and grow activities is overwhelming to
   volunteers
   - *All types of hiring* and staffing are used! Interns, contractors,
   employees, part-time, full-time. When the workload is known to be
   re-occurring, it is most needed to have staff over contractors.
   - It is essential that *job descriptions accurately portray amount of
   admin work*
   - Currently, there are *not clear on-boarding plans*, and this can cause
   some growing pains with a Board of Directors which are generally used to be
   more hands-on
   - Organizations are* hiring sooner* upon recognition by AffCom

While not earth-shattering results, they provide us a good starting point
on better understanding why, how, and when to shift away from an
all-volunteer model. It helps bring up some consistencies across groups as
well as discrepancies. This is just one input into better understanding the
state of and trends in our movement organizations.

If you have thoughts, PLEASE - participate in conversation on the talk
page. It would be great to capture more stories from the ground of the
purposes and challenges of bringing on a new employee. If you have
experiences from other volunteer organizations, please feel free to augment
the conversation with these as well!

Thanks -
Jessie

[1] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Wikimedia_First_Employee_Survey<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Wikimedia_First_Employee_Survey/2013_Survey_Results>
[2]
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Wikimedia_First_Employee_Survey/2013_Survey_Results



-- 

*Jessie WildGrantmaking Learning & Evaluation *
*Wikimedia Foundation*

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