2009/10/16 Platonides <Platonides(a)gmail.com>om>:
Strategy intends to learn which things are important,
but just having a
developer coming to the Village Pump to implement whatever the local
community needs [and is reasonable] could make a difference.
I agree that we need a healthy mix of project-based work (where we
identify priorities together, but WMF ultimately needs to make a call
of where it wants to focus its resources) and reactive work that is
about fixing or assigning small bugs, integrating existing
community-built extensions or making toolserver hacks into core
functionality, reviewing code, etc. This is why in addition to larger
scale project-based work and project contracts, we also are growing
our core team. The recently posted Code Maintenance Engineer position
falls into the core team category:
http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Job_openings/Code_Maintenance_Engineer
We have additional positions budgeted later in the year, and if the
fundraiser performs according to plan, we'll continue to expand both
project and core capacity. I think even if WMF were 10 times as large
as it is, though, we'd still have many of the same conversations about
"why this thing and not the other thing" all the time - probably more,
because there'd be more resources to compete for. :-)
--
Erik Möller
Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation
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