On 9/3/10 4:55 PM, Robert Leverington wrote: > It's very dissapointing to see many of the suggestions discarded almost > immediatley by most of the staff members replying as "unrealistic".
I can't speak for others, but I have to say that the idea of having paid developers without a space for them to work together in person is very unrealistic. My first month working for the WMF was as a remote contractor, and let me tell you it was a miserable experience. There is a reason why virtually every job posting for a programmer in any organization says "no remote contractors". It is almost impossible to work effectively in a software organization without being physically in the same room at least part of the time, and it's especially difficult to ramp up quickly as a new employee. Now, with open source projects, contributors have already self-selected, passed through many filters, and probably gone through a slow process of learning how to contribute. (But you should consider though that something like 9/10 people who want to contribute to such projects usually find the barriers too high). So, people who are already part of the Wikimedia community can probably tolerate more remote work. But even open source projects often hold "hackathons" or other coding get-togethers, and I think everyone will agree these are far more productive. To his credit Aryeh is aware of this but he believes that the productivity hit is worth it if it ensures the organization is 100% transparent. I just don't agree we need to go to such lengths. That said -- there are techniques which we could adopt which could help equalize things. For instance, Nat Friedman believes that when conducting conference calls, everyone should dial in (even people who could be in the same room).[1] [1] http://nat.org/blog/2010/04/everyone-dials-in/ -- Neil Kandalgaonkar ( <ne...@wikimedia.org> _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
