Agree with Tim, one would image that a fair bit of thought would have gone into a decision such as this. That it would have occurred over multiple meetings with substantial input from various parts of the organization. I think it is reasonable to give the WMF some time to comment on this further.
Yuri Astrakhan is still listed as "Interactive Tech Team Lead" https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Yurik Further clarification around that including comments from him would be useful. I know from my meetings with Yuri over the years he is very dedicated to the work of developing tools that help Wiki(m)pedia build rich content.
J
On Wed, Jan 25, 2017 at 2:50 PM, Tim Landscheidt tim@tim-landscheidt.de wrote:
Anna Stillwell astillwell@wikimedia.org wrote:
[…]
I also hear that the pause on the interactive work is temporary. I’ve
heard
them request time. I am comfortable granting that request, but no one is required to agree with me. They’ve also said that the person with the
most
information is on vacation. As someone who has seen employees go through considerable stress in the last years, the entire executive team is
working
to establish some cultural standards around supporting vacations. We want people here to feel comfortable taking proper vacations and sometimes
that
can even need to happen in a crisis. People often plan their vacations
well
in advance and may not know that something tricky will come up. Just so
you
understand one bias I bring to this conversation.
[…]
I concur with DJ in his initial mail that this is not a use- ful practice, and I doubt very much that it relieves employ- ees' stress. It conveys the organizational expectation that employees are SPOFs without any backup. An employee should not experience their time off as a period where his work load is just temporarily buffered until his return, but where colleagues will step in and take care of business. Especially such a major decision like "pausing" a team should not depend on the inner thoughts of one employee, but be backed and explainable by others.
Tim
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