Comments on: Wikimedia Foundation Community Fellowship program

By: Wilfredo Rodríguez

Wilfredo Rodríguez — Wed, 22 Sep 2010 00:28:41 +0000

Excellent proposal.

I think that can be studied both proposals.

1) Being able to work remotely (saving costs and facilitating the participation)
3) Bringing people to work at the same place (San Francisco). This
could have a big cost and I do not speak only of the economic factor.

It is a good time to consider decentralizing the project headquarters
outside the U.S.. However, I believe it is necessary to incorporate in
developing countries.

Here in Venezuela, for example, access to the Internet (aside from
dial-up networking) is only available to 12% of the population. This
would be a great difficulty if someone wants to work remotely.

I currently work distributing wikipedia offline (kiwix) in places
without Internet access (paragraphs remote locations).

By: Zack Exley

Zack Exley — Mon, 20 Sep 2010 02:47:42 +0000

Kozuch – When I said ‘help fellows’ work in SF, I didn’t mean force them to. My sense is that a lot of people would like to work (physically) alongside collaborators if given a chance. For people working on full-time intensive projects, it can be nice to be in the same space. What I was trying to say is that if someone from Kenya wants to work in the SF office during their fellowship, we’ll try to make that just as easy for them as for someone who already lives in SF. But if they want to stay in their location, that’s fine too. I’ve worked on full-time staffs that have been scattered around the world, and it’s worked great.

By: Kozuch

Kozuch — Sun, 19 Sep 2010 07:48:32 +0000

I cant understand why remote work is still such a problem for an entity, whose reach is truly global… How long will it take the Foundation to realize that applying geographical bias by pulling all people to San Francisco is a bad idea? This applies to both Fellows ans staff… What all Wikimedia projects need is better opportunities for people working remotely, hopefully Fellows will be a first spark of hope for these people.

I undestand you can be opposed to remote work because of greater risks involved, but these risks might still be lower than you applying your San Francisco bias so that you simply miss the correct individuals in your staff or Fellows because they simply are not willing to relocate. This has to change, or Wikimedia will never really grow again.

When speaking about staff, you should open several offices in the world to provide local support to volunteers and chapters, I cant undestand you still have no office in Europe for example… with a budget of several million this surely is not a problem of money, but only a problem of will…

Zack, please forward my message to the right people in the Foundation if you can. Thanks.

By: Zack Exley

Zack Exley — Thu, 16 Sep 2010 13:45:21 +0000

Guillaume: That’s a great question and I realize I should have addressed it in the blog post now that you mention it. Attracting and accommodating people from many countries and language communities will be one of the big goals of the Fellows program. Yes, many will probably work from their home countries. But we want to do everything we can to help fellows, in general, work here in San Francisco with the rest of the staff and Fellows.

By: MarkDilley

MarkDilley — Thu, 16 Sep 2010 06:12:08 +0000

Kudos to all involved – Steven is an excellent WikiAmbassador!

By: Liam

Liam — Thu, 16 Sep 2010 02:22:05 +0000

Very cool.

+1 to Guillaume’s question though.
Also – what actually is Steven’s project?

By: Marie Deatherage

Marie Deatherage — Wed, 15 Sep 2010 22:49:57 +0000

You couldn’t have made a better choice for a wiki pioneer! I just hope you let him come back to us in Portland someday!

By: Nihiltres

Nihiltres — Wed, 15 Sep 2010 21:23:55 +0000

Heh, I suspected that Steven was involved with something like this, but I wasn’t sure precisely what the clues I saw meant. This makes sense. :)

The Fellowship model sounds promising. Hopefully it will work out well.

By: Guillaume Paumier

Guillaume Paumier — Wed, 15 Sep 2010 21:10:05 +0000

This is excellent and very exciting news. Congratulations Steven :)

One question though: the Wikimedia community is global, and working in the US is pretty difficult for foreigners. How do you intend to address this challenge? Will people be able to be “remote fellows”?

More generally, how does the Foundation intend to facilitate the involvement of worldwide volunteers & staff in order to harness the potential of the global Wikimedia community? This may be more of an HR question; perhaps a topic for another blog post :)