[Osmf-talk] Framework for the foundation's hiring practices

[Frederik Ramm]

Tobias,

the two points I worry about most when considering hired staff are
organisational bloat and power shift.

1. organisational bloat

It is almost a law of nature that, except perhaps due to an outside
crisis, organisations never shrink. If you hire someone and the work you
hired them for becomes less, you will find something else for them to
do. If you find that you don't have enough money to pay your staff,
you'll hire a fundraising professional to help you pay for it all. The
excess funds that person generates will then give you the opportunity to
hire more people, etc.

This is driven by an inherent value judgement coming from the corporate
world that "growth is good", and therefore shrinking is a sign of
weakness. Going back from five employees to three will lead to questions
like "so, have you misjudged the situation then? are you not having the
success you thought you'd have?" and so on, and if - god forbid - there
should be any board members with an aspiration to polish they CV with
their time on the OSMF board, they will certainly not want to be the
person during whose reign the organisation has cut down on staff.
Nothing underlines "growth" and "success" more visibly for
businesspeople than hiring permanent staff.

I am constantly saying that we must be extremely careful about adopting
value sets from the commercial world. We are not a business. We do not
sell a product. We do not (really) have competition. And we are not on a
timeline - we don't have to deliver by Q4 or anything. This innocence is
something most organisations lose over time - look at behemoths like
Wikimedia, or the Red Cross, or MSF, they all are businesses in all but
their name. They have plans and projects and deadlines, reporting
duties, and many jobs are on the line if they don't deliver. Let us
avoid going there, for as long as we can.

In addition to the capitalist "growth is good" reason for bloat, there's
also the human factor - we want to be a good employer, and not put an
employee in a hot seat saying "we'll review this every month and as soon
as you're not needed any more we'll fire you". The employee will become
our valued colleague or even our friend over time, and letting them go
could hurt on a personal level (we "let them down"). We cannot
realistically offer long-term job security to anyone, and we should not
be promising that, but of course we must give them *some* security for
their own planning.

But all in all, we must never be afraid to shrink. We must regularly
review the size of our organisation and ask if this is justified or if
we're starting to bloat. Someone independent - who is not involved in
hiring people and who is not an actual or potential hire - should
regularly do such a review, asking "do we have more staff than needed to
perform our necessary function". "But we have the money, let's do
something with it" must never be a reason to hire someone.

2. power shift

There are two dimensions to power shift when it comes to hired staff.
One is strengthening the board vis-a-vis the community. Since staff will
be directly or indirectly controlled by the board, and answerable to the
board, staff members will be unlikely to publicly stand against anything
the board does; rather they will work for the board. If board embarks on
some folly because one board member has managed to convince their
colleagues that, say, founding an outreach office in the Congo is a
great idea, then all employees will go "yay, great plan". The community
will receive a newsletter written by an employee outlining the fantastic
opportunities, and there will be nice photos taken by a paid contractor
on-location. An employee will provide nice quarterly reports about the
great success of the project, and so on - and the few critical voices
will either not even speak up, or not be heard among all the positive
news. And who will not want to re-elect the board members responsible
for this great success?

Currently, the board commands more or less only the power that comes
with the time they personally invest, which is not nothing, but it is
limited. With every additional employee who does the board's bidding,
the power of the board (measured in numbers of hours working towards a
certain goal) increases. This power can also be used for putting a spin
on things and trying to influence board elections. I don't have a good
idea how to keep this in check but it would certainly be good if staff
members were not exclusively answerable to the board. Particularly,
there should be some clause in the employment contracts that protects
the staff members against retribution for speaking openly to the community.

The other dimension of power shift would probably come into play later,
once we have 5 or more employees. Imagine we had 5 full-time employees,
between themselves and over the course of a year they would probably
spend more time than the board and all working group members taken
together. If they band together they can make a lot happen, or not
happen. They can probably get someone elected to then be their boss...
or get some not-elected who prefers cutting down on the number of staff.
So that's also something to keep in mind.

And I do recognize that these two power shifts are contradictory, and
that on the one hand you don't want the employees to enhance the board's
power too much and on the other hand you don't want them to start having
too much control either.

The easiest way to avoid these dangers is not having any employees of
course but that has other downsides. The fact that many corporate
players have people on their payroll whose sole goal it is to push OSM
in one direction or another that fits their current business interests
is not lost on me, and if you ask me whether I'd rather have an employee
increase Facebook's influence on OSM or the OSMF board's influence on
OSM, I don't have to think twice.

Bye
Frederik

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