On 18 June 2012 15:28, Charles Matthews
<charles.r.matthews@ntlworld.com> wrote:
On 18 June 2012 15:17, HJ Mitchell <
hjmitchell@ymail.com> wrote:
> I may be wrong, but I suspect the idea is to aim high, hoping but not
> expecting that somebody will apply who meets all the criteria, and failing
> that, that we'll get somebody who meets most of the criteria and could pick
> up or be trained in the the skills they need.
been in terms of "it would be nice if" or "we are in the business of
getting into that business" or other such aspirational stuff.
I'm actually going on my experience of being recruited to do WMUK's
admin, six months after it should have been clear that WMUK needed at
least a half-time person, at 12 hours a week. Discussions I had after
the interview turned out to be utterly fruitless. There were reasons
for that, but in any case I completely failed to professionalise WMUK
as the first hire, which should have been on the job description.
No amount of corporate jargon and/or penny-pinching can cover up not
getting the right person for the job because the position is a vaguish
proposition. So I think Tom has a point.
This is right.
One of my experiences in around the last 18 months is that smaller companies (which we are, lets face it) start out contracting technical work because it is significantly cheaper. We've identified several areas of experience we need:
* PHP development
* Virtual server sysadmin
* SSL (a specific experience in itself!)
* Experience with finance/taking money (again; something quite specific)
* Security reivew
* Project management
* Advocacy
If we have a budget of £29K to spend on people doing this then hiring one person is far from optimal. Anyone you find will lack requisite experience in any one of these, which means our objectives won't be met.
On the other hand you have a major asset in that several community members do have this experience - and might be interested in a robust volunteer driven model.
Contracting the specific expertise needed, whilst developing a robust community department is an excellent model :)
Tom