a good idea?

(This dual forum (here + on the blog) is a little confusing :)

Until now, the Wikimedia Foundation has “survived” with limited financial and human resources. We are now in a position where our financial situation is more comfortable, and it’s natural to convert these financial resources into human resources, considering the Foundation has been ridiculously understaffed for years.

Phoebe, you of all people must know the insane amount of work the current Foundation staff has had to bear; it is not uncommon for a WMF employee to work 50 to 60 hours a week, because they have to. That’s not sustainable.

The financial / fundraising goals can be reached — I fully trust my co-workers who made this decision. And even if they can’t, we have back-up plans.

I hear your concerns about the risks associated with such a rapid growth in personnel. But with more people, the staff will be more available and more responsive to the community. With more people, the Foundation will be able to support the community more effectively. Until now the staff has had to focus on more “internal” tasks; I expect a larger staff to be able to devote more time to interacting with the community.

In a word, I think having more staff at the Foundation will enable the Foundation to work more closely with the community; it is an opportunity for better collaboration and integration. And also an opportunity for talented community members to join the staff :) We need more people on staff who share that historical & community knowledge with their co-workers who are relatively new to the Wikimedia universe.

I vote everyone works less. But that's just me.

I see no serious effort at separating the things that can equally well be done by volunteers from those that require the centralization of paid staff. It's looking at things backwards to see that we have money available, so we must spend it. I would instead suggest that we have reached our current status because we have had the absolute minimum of paid staff, and if we depart from it we shall be turning into the sort of organization that discourages volunteerism and diversity. The basic structure of Wikipedia is that anyone can work on whatever they please, but they know that the quality of the site will depend directly on themselves and others like them. This encourages personal responsibility and personal initiative. All of this is lost in a site relying upon professionals for its direction. The existence of paid staff with professional titles inherently exposes us to the danger that they will think that they, not the volunteers, run Wikipedia , and the volunteers are only peripheral. This is not why the volunteers work here. They work because they know that more than with anything else they might be doing , they actually do affect the project directly. Our strength is our chaotic manner of working, and we should not compromise it. Every additional staff member contributes to the ossification of the overall project. If this is irreversible, the best course will be to fork the project: I predict the fork without the staff will do the better.

+1

DGG above expresses many of my feelings about the staffing levels and how it affects volunteer motivation.

At the moment, I'm mostly involved with OpenStreetMap, which prides itself as being "100% volunteer run" and that's a very helpful thing to be able to say when recruiting new volunteers, and appealing to people's altruistic motives.

For Wikimedia, I think that volunteers should be positioned high in the org chart, and staff fill in and supplement in areas that volunteers are weak.

I'm also not thrilled about the departmentalisation, and rather would like to see more cross-fertilization between the various areas and between staff and editing community.

Volunteers are at the top of the org chart - they form the Board of Trustees. And yes, the general organizing principle of the work of WMF is to fill strategic and operational gaps and facilitate volunteer efforts. Whether staffing numbers are (relatively speaking) large or small does not say anything about whether we're being successful at doing so. I see no reason why it isn't possible to build a 200 people organization that's wonderfully capable of supporting volunteer work without displacing it, or a 20 people organization that's utterly incompetent at doing so. Each WMF initiative, including this very strategy process, needs to be carefully assessed in how it's influenced and been embedded into volunteer efforts; in every case, there are lessons to be learned for next time, and we need to work together to figure out the best ways to support Wikimedia's mission.

That's all true regardless of whether WMF grows or remains static, but growth almost certainly guarantees that we'll fail more (because we'll do more). Not a bad thing, as long as we iterate, remain self-aware, and get smarter.

Aude, you said that volunteers should be positioned high in the org chart, and paid staff should fill in and supplement where volunteers are weak. As Eloquence noted, this is the case right now. Do you disagree? If so, could you elaborate?

[Argh... just lost what I wrote, with a external link being caught by the spam filter and what I wrote gone :(]

Fair point about the Board drawing from the community.

One area that I think should be especially community/locally/chapter-driven is GLAM outreach. An example where that was not the case was the NIH Wikipedia Academy last summer. Only at the last minute (five days before) were bot notices sent out to DC area Wikipedians, inviting them to be involved. [1]

Instead, by involving local DC Wikipedians early in the planning process, you would find active volunteers who also have experience with how the government bureaucracy works and also volunteers who have local contacts/networks (e.g. know people at NIH). Although not subject matter experts, they would be valuable in the planning process. I happened to be stalking MetaWiki recent changes and found out about the academy, but otherwise might have been in the dark and not informed until too late. (e.g. I already had travel plans, couldn't get out of work, etc.)

Fortunately, I see things are happening at the local/community level for outreach to the Smithsonian. I would like to see this continue, with decisions/direction at this level, things remain grassroots and bottom-up, and draw upon the Foundation as a resource when-needed. I would be disappointed if a staff member replaced the local/community in this effort, except perhaps if the local/community person was at some point hired or funded (via grant).