[Osmf-talk] Hiring help for OSMF administrative tasks

[Eleanor Tutt]

I think we need to respect that the board is examining the possibility of
part time administrative help for good reason.  I like that they are
looking for general feedback first before asking us to comment on a
specific plan.

Administrative tasks can be quite thankless because when they are done
well, very few people notice. It is incredibly difficult to know how much
time is being spent behind the scenes.  I volunteer with several staff-free
organizations, and the volunteers end up receiving some very predictable
complaints: that meetings/events are not scheduled far enough in advance or
publicized well enough, that minutes are not made available in a timely
fashion, that it takes volunteers a long time to respond to emails, etc.
In the meantime, the volunteers feel like they spend the bulk of their time
on - you guessed it! - scheduling & publicizing meetings, typing minutes,
and responding to emails.

Part time staff at organizations I know of have worked great for the
following sorts of things:

- "herding cats"...making sure everyone is prepped and ready for meetings,
keeping on top of news/milestones from the community and from other
organizations of interest and briefing board members, keeping track of
shared calendars, etc.
- handling predictable communications (including publicizing important
dates, typing board meeting minutes and so forth)
- responding to basic queries (including routing more complex questions to
the right people)
- drafting documents/blog posts/etc. for board/volunteers to polish
- prepping financial reports for board meetings

That list may sound unimaginative, but those are the sorts of tasks that
easily fall by the wayside even with well-meaning volunteers.

Eleanor


On Wed, Mar 11, 2015 at 11:01 AM, Frederik Ramm <frederik at remote.org> wrote:

> Hi,
>
> On 03/11/2015 11:52 AM, Peter Barth wrote:
> > I had to wait several weeks to learn about your plans of hiring staff.
> For
> > what? You don't even know, you're asking us.
>
> There will detailed minutes of the meeting as soom as they are ready.
> This was a two-day thing where we wrote tons of things on tons of
> post-its and we've photographed everything and made notes but getting
> this into a good shape will take some time (and the person doing it is a
> volunteer with a day job... of course if we were to have a hired person
> write the minutes maybe it would be quicker... oh but wait you were
> against that ;)
>
> Minute writing is not a simple task because they have to convey the
> right message. Look at the example above: I said that we were "looking
> into hiring part-time administrative help", and you read "plan of hiring
> staff". Minutes that are carelessly written will be misread in various
> ways just like you misread my post.
>
> Bye
> Frederik
>
> --
> Frederik Ramm  ##  eMail frederik at remote.org  ##  N49°00'09" E008°23'33"
>
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