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<div class="moz-cite-prefix">Emile: "oh hell no" is a fair
expression of horror! The buzzword is hateful and often
mis-applied - but do you hate the general idea of pinning routine
work and performance assessment down to pre-agreed work goals and
times? If you're spending other people's money, I hope not. <br>
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<div class="moz-cite-prefix">I fully agree that there are other ways
to work. Agile development is far looser, allows frequent
direction changes and is just far more fun. In this case we are
not hiring people to do development, we are working to reduce risk
and improve the resilience of our operations. In my world,
Operations are not agile - for good reason. The proposed Ops
contractor is there to follow the Standard Operational Procedures
to the letter, and keep the engines running at 99.999%
availability. <br>
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<div class="moz-cite-prefix">In this way our dedicated SysOps and
SysAdmin volunteers are released from the daily drudgery of
monitoring and maintenance work and can take on the more
interesting systems development work. <br>
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<div class="moz-cite-prefix">CA<br>
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<div class="moz-cite-prefix">On 2020/05/11 22:42, Emilie Laffray
wrote:<br>
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<div dir="auto">Just a quick "oh hell no" to SMART. It is one of
the worth assessment methodology in the tech world.
<div dir="auto">This is the bane of my life and you end up
creating goals just for the sake of creating goals that are
impossible to miss. </div>
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<div class="gmail_quote">
<div dir="ltr" class="gmail_attr">On Mon, May 11, 2020, 14:15
Craig Allan <<a href="mailto:allan@iafrica.com"
moz-do-not-send="true">allan@iafrica.com</a>> wrote:<br>
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<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0
.8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">Hi All,<br>
I was battling to find a short reply to Tobias's request for
comments, <br>
but Severin has crystallised my thoughts.<br>
We are being asked to comment in the absence of specifics
which IMHO is <br>
not a good approach - I predict it will produce lots of words
and very <br>
few answers. So here are my words:<br>
<br>
The situation seems to be serious. We are running a world wide
network <br>
of about 96 servers, using only 4 volunteers as sysadmins. The
system <br>
is, as far as I know, very heavily used and is only just
coping with the <br>
loads. So I pause to salute the heroes who keep it all
running. Amazing <br>
work!<br>
I fully support buying some permanent resource to add
resilience to the <br>
system and take the load off the volunteers.<br>
<br>
I also fully support a lot of the concerns people have posted
about the <br>
messiness of directly hiring somebody who is going to work for
a <br>
collective, not work for one manager. To eliminate a lot of
the <br>
problems I would support arms-length hiring practice. By that
I mean we <br>
should be hiring a medium to large company to perform the
services. <br>
Hiring a company is typically more expensive at first
impression, but <br>
the extra we will pay to a company rolls up and packages all
the legal, <br>
labour and human messiness and hidden costs of employing an
actual person.<br>
<br>
Hiring a company has the added advantage that it forces us to
write a <br>
clear SMART job description, forces us to limit the scope of
work and it <br>
encourages us to do an unemotional assessment of performance
against <br>
that clear job description.<br>
<br>
I also think that a company performing a set task will be
focused on the <br>
work, will be less involved in the totality of the OSMF and
will have <br>
less inclination to mess with our internal politics.<br>
<br>
Craig ALLAN<br>
<br>
* My mapperId is cRaIgalLAn<br>
* SMART is an acronym for "Specific, Measurable,Attainable,
Relevant, <br>
Time-bound"<br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
On 2020/05/06 22:24, Tobias Knerr wrote:<br>
> Hi all,<br>
><br>
> the OSMF Board wants to think about a general framework
to hire people<br>
> to fill in the gaps that volunteers can't fill. We
believe that, given<br>
> good practices and firm boundaries, hiring people would
be worthwhile.<br>
> It could ensure the continued stability of the OSM
platform (servers,<br>
> integral software) among other things, and augment the
currently<br>
> overworked volunteers and under resourced efforts in the
face of<br>
> continued growth.<br>
> ...<br>
><br>
> Feel free to share your ideas here or send them to <a
href="mailto:board@osmfoundation.org" target="_blank"
rel="noreferrer" moz-do-not-send="true">board@osmfoundation.org</a><br>
><br>
><br>
<br>
<br>
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