[Osmf-talk] Working with Dorothea full-time

[Frederik Ramm]

Hi Christoph,

I think the board should probably pay someone to come up with a concept
paper on the implications of paid work on the OSMF and its position in
the OSM community.

This sounds like a joke but I am serious. We have in the past said that
we should mainly consider paid work for tedious jobs that we cannot find
any volunteers for. Your request for a detailed assessment is a prime
example of tedious work that nobody in the board is burning to spend
their volunteer time on, so if you feel that such work is needed, it is
perhaps time to "go the Wikimedia Foundation route" and pay consultants
to do this work for us.

Now you could cry foul and say that if the board isn't even prepared to
go through that little exercise they should not be trusted with the
money in the first place, but this is not a "little exercise", this is a
very wide-ranging issue of governance that would require us writing down
lots of things, presumably revisiting our "mission statement" and taking
it from there. In order to prepare a write-up of the kind that stands up
to your level of scrutiny, many many person-weeks will have to be spent
writing definitions and drawing the line between paid work and volunteer
work.

In contrast, the board is taking the approach: We have tried it, it
worked well for everyone, let's continue on a more serious scale.

I am fully aware that this means we are lacking the answers to some
questions.

The conflict comes mainly from the fact that you view this on a strict
non-personal matter. In your eyes, the board is creating a full-time
position to be filled by a suitable contractor or employee, and you
expect there to be a job description that explains exactly what we want
the person to do and how many hours to spend on what. Who the person is
to fill that position, is something you will only consider later, it
doesn't matter initially. Of course, rules need to be drawn up to ensure
that whoever takes that position doesn't usurp volunteer work or makes
themselves a willing instrument for the board exerting more control and
muscling their way into parts of the project they couldn't hitherto
reach, etc.

The way I see it is totally different: It starts not with an empty slot
to be filled be a replaceable contractor, it starts with Dorothea with
whom I have worked together for a good 1.5 years now. She is not a
random contractor. She has her own rules and ways of doing things, and
she is very eager not to replace any volunteers (of which she, in
addition to her paid work, is also one). Dorothea will be the first
person to step aside as soon as any volunteer so much as lifts a hand.
She is the right person to do this, and the opportunity to solidify our
work with her is a chance I do not want us to miss.

For me, this does not mean we are "creating a position" that, should
Dorothea ever leave us, has to be filled with another person. It might,
if someone equally suitable is available; otherwise, we'll have to do
without.

> The board has apparently discussed this matter more than half a year 
> ago at the f2f but have not shared the content or results of this 
> discussion in substance with the community

True, this could have been done better.

> until now while continuing 
> to make concrete plans and even hiring a consultancy for advise on 
> practical implementation of their plans - all without informing the 
> members.

You're not exactly making "informing the members" any more enticing I
have to say ;) the issue with this particular item is that it touches
the contract/employment situation of a person, and it is always a little
unclear how much of it should be considered personal information. For
example, if this is discussed on the board, a certain assessment of the
contractor's qualities will come into the discussion. Is it ok for this
to be public? Is it fair? Is it more "professional" to keep everything
that even remotely sounds like "payroll issues" under wraps?

I agree that "extending Dorothea's hours" could have been discussed
earlier, but then again, it would have led to exactly the same result it
does now and did in the past - your demand that "you have to provide an
exact job description and show that this cannot be done by volunteers".

I say, if you have someone as good and respectful as Dorothea then you
do not need an exact job description. It will work out to everyone's
benefit. You will say that it is reckless, that we have to define a
process that will work even if the person in the job is adversarial and
cannot be trusted to make their decisions in a way that do not harm the
community. I will say sure, but this is not about working with "anyone",
this is about working with Dorothea! You will say that that's not the
point. I will say nggggghghhhh.

> Specific example:  You now write:
> 
>> [...] by helping with the
>> administration of the upcoming microgrant programme, and others.
> 
> But when you requested comments on your plans for the microgrants 
> program two weeks ago you did not provide any hint that you were 
> planning to administer this with paid staff.

Yes, I am not involved in the microgrant discussions in the board too
much. But it seems obvious to me that some management will be required
and Dorothea would be well suited to do it. I think it is good if the
design of the microgrant programme does not *rely* on there being an
administrative assistant who can help (because if Dorothea should quit
we might not have one), so any "concrete plan" that says "the admin
assistant can do it" would have been dangerous.

> How can you expect useful feedback from the community on plans like this 
> when you specifically hide your considerations on central aspects of 
> your plans from the members when you present those plans?

This is a very good example of you suspecting evil plans when there is
nothing of the sort. I don't know if those board members who worked on
the microgrants programme thought in their heads that "Dorothea can do
it", if they did, they certainly did not say it. It was me who listed a
number of things that were *obviously* things that Dorothea *could* be
doing. These are not "plans" and they were not "hidden" by those who
worked on the microgrants stuff.

> My intention is not to dress down the board for this - i am sure from 
> the perspective of the board there are reasons for this.

Or not - as I said, it could just be some board members concentrating on
one thing and others on another.

> But i think 
> the board should understand that this is part of a general problem of a 
> culture of intransparency and exclusivity prevalent within the 
> organizational culture creating immense problems when interacting with 
> the broader OSM community who largely strongly despise this kind of 
> culture.

There is a grain of truth in what you say but you are also whipping
things up far beyond what is reasonable. By suspecting evil machinations
where there is, at worst, a lack of diligence, and by using words like
"despise", you are playing to an audience of outrage like so many
populist politicians. We haven't deserved this.

> What i strongly miss in your announcement is any reflection on all those 
> matters that have been the core of the discussion when the idea of 
> hiring paid help for administrative tasks within the OSMF in the first 
> place.  Specifically this is mostly about the relation and conflicts 
> between volunteer work and paid work.

See initial paragraph about hiring professionals to do a month-long
community consultation and provide a 50-page full-colour brochure with
the results.

> One of the main points of the OSMF being based on and depending on 
> volunteer work is that it forces the OSMF - in particular the board - 
> to comply with the collective needs and wishes of the volunteer 
> community.

In theory this is right, and I support that. In practice, of course,
this foundation is already eaten away at by people who "volunteer" their
paid employment time.

> Volunteers tend to have their own idea on how they want 
> things to work they volunteer for.  In a do-ocratic culture like we 
> have in the OSM community that is the base assumption we work under.

... and if people "volunteer" their paid work time, then their bosses
are the ones in whose hands the do-ocractic power concentrates.

> Now if you call for volunteers but don't want them to bring in and 
> insist on following their own ideas on how projects should be run that 
> will mean you have more difficulties getting qualified people to 
> volunteer.

Of course a balance needs to be struck, you wouldn't want every
volunteer to the sysadmin group to switch from Chef to Ansible to Puppet
and back again. Sometimes volunteering requires to, at least initially,
swim with the flow before you can assert your own ways.

> You can then of course - using money collected from 
> corporations - buy in paid work to fill the gap and continue managing 
> projects to your own liking but this way you'd be digging yourselves 
> into a hole disconnected from the community you want to represent and 
> you could have difficulties getting out of this again in the future.

Then again, collecting money from corporations and hiring someone to do
work to our liking *could* still be preferable to being sent
"volunteers" from corporations and submit to their "do-ocracy".

Not saying you are wrong, just offering an additional data point. Of
course, having lots of volunteers available for everything we need would
be ideal. But there are many areas in which you cannot, as a volunteer,
simply do what you please. For example if you had a volunteer writing
board minutes, you'd have the community breathing down their neck to do
it properly. If you were a volunteer in the SotM-WG dealing with
scholarship arrangements, you couldn't suddenly say "you know what,
we'll not do Visas this year" and so on, these things would still need
to be discussed in the group and the volunteer would have to submit to
the collective decision.

> The motivation of the average hobby mapper to volunteer for working in 
> that project without being able to substantially shape it is therefore 
> rather low.  

I think if I were running SotM-WG and an average hobby mapper came to me
offering their volunteer contribution for, in return, a chance to
"substantially shape" the event, my response would be a cautious
suggestion if they could perhaps start a bit smaller ;)

> You will never be able to create a true 
> community conference this way that is carried and shaped collectively 
> by a large number of voluteers (like for example the CCC).

I don't want to pre-empt Christine here but I think she's very fond of
the idea of getting more people to make volunteer work contributions to
SotM. The great thing about Dorothea is that if Christine manages to
make this happen, Dorothea will say "great, then I can do something
else" rather than try to out-perform volunteers.

Bye
Frederik

-- 
Frederik Ramm  ##  eMail frederik at remote.org  ##  N49°00'09" E008°23'33"