[Osmf-talk] Hiring help for OSMF administrative tasks

Harry Wood mail at harrywood.co.uk
Thu Mar 12 12:04:11 UTC 2015


I'll echo Ben. I completely understand the need for payed help to do administrative work and trust the board when they say it would be a good step to hire someone.

I can also see that the various working groups would likely have a shopping list of tedious admin tasks they'd like help with. It's also about having some growing room. For example in not-too-distant-future there might a bit of admin related to all our (more numerous) local chapters.


There's the old debate: OSMF should expand to hire lots of people, versus OSMF should remain a lean volunteer-driven organisation. In that sense we might say there's a principle at stake in this discussion. Maybe we're starting down a slippery slope towards a more heavyweight organisation like WikiMedia Foundation (Not necessarily a very bad slope to slip down, but it means heavyweight funding requirements and nasty heavyweight donation banners etc) ...That old debate.

Personally I'm happy with the OSMF taking baby steps towards growing a *little bit* as an organisation. We're not *really* starting down a slippery slope, in that OSMF has already hired people to do bits and bobs. An admin hire is just more of that. I do trust that the board are always aware of the debate about growth, and that they are not blindly judging OSMF success on how many employees it's grown to.

Harry




________________________________
From: Ben Abelshausen <ben.abelshausen at gmail.com>
To: Henk Hoff <toffehoff at gmail.com> 
Cc: "osmf-talk at openstreetmap.org" <osmf-talk at openstreetmap.org> 
Sent: Thursday, 12 March 2015, 8:17
Subject: Re: [Osmf-talk] Hiring help for OSMF administrative tasks






On Wed, Mar 11, 2015 at 11:31 PM, Henk Hoff <toffehoff at gmail.com> wrote:

Keep them coming :-)  We appreciate your input.

I completely understand the need for payed help to do administrative work and trust the board when they say it would be a good step to hire someone. 

Withing the OSM Belgium working group, as part of OKFN Belgium, we have one person who is dedicated to the organization and helps the volunteers (us) when we need him.

It is great to have someone to fall back on and to have someone that takes care of stuff that you would never get to doing when volunteering. I'm thinking for example about rethinking and optimizing the way we write/send/receive invoices, manage sponsors and write all the documents needed, evaluating the financial situation of a project/event, spell check blogposts, give feedback on communication, keep volunteers awake when there are deadlines, ...

What is also very important is to have someone who works without the constraints of being a volunteer (and the time constraints that come with it). Someone that is there to always keep an eye on things, to reply to email, even when it's just 'we will get back to you after I consult this or that person' someone to respond and manage small things on a daily basis.

Without this person we would be a lot less effective at what we do!

Cheers,

Ben 


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