On 23/03/13 03:26, Sumana Harihareswara wrote: > On 03/21/2013 09:54 PM, Tim Starling wrote: > >> Also, community managers generally see it as their responsibility to >> extract as much work from volunteers as possible > > The community managers for MediaWiki (Quim and me) don't think like > this. If you believe we do, please say so. :-)
Maybe I was mistaken, then. It seems like an excellent goal to me, I don't know why you're upset with the allegation. >> and will ask a >> volunteer to do something whether or not a WMF staff member would be >> more than happy to do it. >> >> -- Tim Starling > > You're implying that we should always check whether there is a WMF > staffer available and eager to do a particular task before asking a > volunteer to help out. Not at all. I think you should try to extract as much work from volunteers as possible, and delegating all volunteer-driven tasks to staff members would undermine that. Not that it's up to me, of course. > That would be impractical, and would prevent us from helping eager volunteers > learn. I thought it was so obviously impractical that it wasn't necessary to say that it is impractical. My comments were aimed at encouraging broader direct contact between volunteers and staff. A roadblock can only happen on a one-dimensional surface. Nobody has all the information, and deployment policies created by an individual with respect to their own work are not globally enforceable. Maybe you can clear roadblocks by appointing someone "chief roadblock clearer", but I think encouraging some awareness of the broader landscape and the multiple people who are empowered to get things done would help volunteers to work around their own problems. -- Tim Starling _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
