[Osmf-talk] Hiring help for OSMF administrative tasks

Martijn van Exel m at rtijn.org
Wed Mar 11 16:33:04 UTC 2015


On Tue, Mar 10, 2015 at 2:15 PM, Frederik Ramm <frederik at remote.org> wrote:

> I am writing to ask your opinion of this idea (what tasks would you like
> to see OSMF do more of, and where an administrative assistant could
> help), but even more so to ask for your experience: Are you involved
>

If this is something that you all were able to reach  a quick agreement on
I don't think there is a need to consult this list for opinions. You know
best what your workload looks like, and what your priorities are. You are
an elected board and we entrusted you with the power to make these calls.

Sharing experiences may still be useful, and I can share ours from the US
chapter where we have hired several folks, all on a contracting basis. A
lawyer is helping us out (for a fixed fee) with getting registered charity
status in the U.S. This is a complex process where we are benefiting
greatly from his experience. We hired an accounting firm to help us get
organized with our tax filings and bookkeeping, again on a contracting
basis, but this is billed by the hour. We made sure we first got a decent
estimate of what the total cost would be. We are also hiring a person to do
our day-to-day bookkeeping, also on a hourly fee basis. These are contracts
we can re-evaluate and terminate at any time should we wish to do so. The
cost-benefit analysis clearly plays out favorably: we are able to focus
more on the things we want to accomplish, like organizing events and
growing the mapping community in the US. I would highly recommend looking
into a setup like this. An internship as suggested below may seem
attractive for its low (zero?) cost in €, but comes with overhead: this is
a person who comes to primarily to learn and not to deliver results for the
organization. They will need guidance and often there is a responsibility
for us to report back to the institution where the trainee / intern is
enrolled. All of that distracts from reaching your actual objectives.

Martijn



-- 
Martijn van Exel
skype: mvexel
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/osmf-talk/attachments/20150311/471f645b/attachment.html>


More information about the osmf-talk mailing list