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

Craig Allan allan at iafrica.com
Mon May 11 18:13:15 UTC 2020


Hi All,
I was battling to find a short reply to Tobias's request for comments, 
but Severin has crystallised my thoughts.
We are being asked to comment in the absence of specifics which IMHO is 
not a good approach - I predict it will produce lots of words and very 
few answers. So here are my words:

The situation seems to be serious. We are running a world wide network 
of about 96 servers, using only 4 volunteers as sysadmins. The system 
is, as far as I know, very heavily used and is only just coping with the 
loads. So I pause to salute the heroes who keep it all running. Amazing 
work!
I fully support buying some permanent resource to add resilience to the 
system and take the load off the volunteers.

I also fully support a lot of the concerns people have posted about the 
messiness of directly hiring somebody who is going to work for a 
collective, not work for one manager.  To eliminate a lot of the 
problems I would support arms-length hiring practice. By that I mean we 
should be hiring a medium to large company to perform the services. 
Hiring a company is typically more expensive at first impression, but 
the extra we will pay to a company rolls up and packages all the legal, 
labour and human messiness and hidden costs of employing an actual person.

Hiring a company has the added advantage that it forces us to write a 
clear SMART job description, forces us to limit the scope of work and it 
encourages us to do an unemotional assessment of performance against 
that clear job description.

I also think that a company performing a set task will be focused on the 
work, will be less involved in the totality of the OSMF and will have 
less inclination to mess with our internal politics.

Craig ALLAN

* My mapperId is cRaIgalLAn
* SMART is an acronym for "Specific, Measurable,Attainable, Relevant, 
Time-bound"



On 2020/05/06 22:24, Tobias Knerr wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> the OSMF Board wants to think about a general framework to hire people
> to fill in the gaps that volunteers can't fill. We believe that, given
> good practices and firm boundaries, hiring people would be worthwhile.
> It could ensure the continued stability of the OSM platform (servers,
> integral software) among other things, and augment the currently
> overworked volunteers and under resourced efforts in the face of
> continued growth.
> ...
>
> Feel free to share your ideas here or send them to board at osmfoundation.org
>
>




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