2010/8/13 MZMcBride z@mzmcbride.com:
The area of contractors and Wikimedia hires has to be one of the most opaque parts of Wikimedia. Unless someone is fully certified as a member of the staff and is listed at wmf:Staff,[1] there is almost no way to figure out who's working for Wikimedia, in what capacity, and for what duration. The only real recourse available to contributors is to directly ask each individual person whether or not they're staff, and sometimes they'll answer.[2]
For an organization that prides itself on openness and transparency, I don't see how it's acceptable to intentionally keep the list of people Wikimedia is hiring that are doing code development work a complete secret. I've personally asked Erik to have people listed on some sort of page on the WMFwiki, but apparently the overhead for a simple ordered list is too high.
Yes, this is bad. The problem is that currently, we simply do not have such a list, not even internally. It desperately needs to be compiled and made public. At one point, Tim started a page on officewiki trying to list all dev contractors because he was taken by complete surprise when someone told him he'd been contracting for usability for a few months already. I think I know almost all developers we contract and what they do, but that's only because I proactively stay on top of things by e.g. asking new people who they are and what they do when they appear in the staff channel. Even then, some contractors manage to elude me and I find out about them long after they've been hired.
Without being able to know who's working on what or when or why, it makes it so much harder for people not hired by Wikimedia (the ones who do the majority of the code development) to collaborate with the ones who have been hired (or partially hired).
People who do work for WMF also have this problem: they are generally more up to speed, but they don't have complete knowledge either.
Roan Kattouw (Catrope)