On 13 February 2015 at 23:54, James Hare <james.hare@wikidc.org> wrote:Thanks for the endorsement James :-)On Thursday, February 12, 2015 at 9:11 AM, Liam Wyatt wrote:Dear GLAMWiki-verse,[tl;dr Seeking feedback. Please read the GWT 2.0 grant application draft before I submit it officially: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:PEG/Europeana/GLAMwiki_Toolset ]Thank you very much for taking ownership of GLAMwiki Toolset—a huge project that the WMF is not interested in and no one else really has the resources for.I consider this project central to Wikimedia DC’s strategic priorities and consider its funding to be essential. I am critical of a couple of points:* On the must/should/could/won’t scale, I would consider “improving documentation” to be a lot higher than simply “could.” A regular criticism I hear of the toolset is that the documentation is lousy, and if your goal is to encourage more people to use it without expert help, you need better documentation. I would consider elevating the priority for this.* You will get dinged on your labor rates. Is there a particular reason why it costs $100/hour to build an upload tool, a piece of software that is not terribly specialized—even when considering EU labor rates? This isn’t really a concern for me or Wikimedia DC since we’re not paying for it, but I would be prepared to discuss this should it come up.Those points aside, I really look forward to seeing the improvements that come out of this project. Best of luck to you and Europeana!Cheers,James—James HarePresident, Wikimedia DC@wikimediadcI'm going to respond to the financial question right away because a couple of other people have asked me similar things offlist. It's a valid topic to raise so I might as well publicly reply-all :-) I'll paraphrase this issue as two questions:Question 1: How do you justify the labor rates?Answer: To try to answer that, I have added a new paragraph in the grant application earlier today:"The daily-rate of the different roles listed here is calculated based on the average hourly salary of the relevant Europeana employees. As a project-based organisation that frequently accepts funding tied to specific objectives, Europeana frequently operates by accounting for its staff obligations in 1 hour blocks. Therefore, the costs listed here are not invented specifically for a grant application, they are simply the normal hourly salary of that person x 8 hours = 1 daily rate." https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:PEG/Europeana/GLAMwiki_Toolset#Total_cost_per_roleI hope this answers the question sufficiently, although I do understand that it is not the detailed "justification" that you might like. In short, this is just how much the relevant staff cost.Question 2: Could it be done cheaper elsewhere?Answer: Yeah - probably. No one is pretending that Europeana is the cheapest organisation for building software - especially since it does not normally build software for external organisation - but they're also the only ones with the technical ability, organisational willingness and availability right now. Some others might have the capacity, or the willingness, or the availability - but not all three.
As with the first question, I hope that this explains sufficiently. It is a fair question, and I've tried to give it as straightforward an answer as I can.p.s. I may not be able to respond quickly to any further questions for the next couple of days (it being the weekend and all).-Liam / WittylamaIn my capacity as "that Europeana guy"
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