On 9 April 2015 at 01:16, Garfield Byrd gbyrd@wikimedia.org wrote:
... The advantages of having good access to talented people and organizations WMF interacts with far outweigh any advantages to moving to a lower cost location outside of the San Francisco market area.
I find the world-view expressed here slightly odd to read, perhaps because I am more European than American in background.
My background includes working for long periods with many companies in the U.S. (such as Microsoft) and we managed to do that perfectly with a handful of employees in a Seattle office, and most developers and internal operations such as HR, finance etc. in Europe (very few of these people ever had a need or desire to talk directly with customers or partner organizations). It was easy enough for me to visit the U.S. a couple of times a year when there was a lot going on there, and work on a daily basis within a lively virtual team spread out in offices across London, Paris and New York.
"Talented people" can be found in many places including San Francisco, and though Google is incredibly important, there many other critically important potential open knowledge partners without headquarters in SF (Europeana springs to mind). Even Mozilla has a very nice office to work with here in London. The idea that having all functions in SF has advantages that "far outweigh" all other considerations seems to over-egg the case, perhaps it would be a good thing to leave the door open a crack for alternative ways of working to be possible in a far future.
Fae