Talk:Wikimedia Foundation/People

Employee resource groups

Thank you for sharing recent work. I'm curious what the "employee resource groups" work in practice, especially considering the distributed workforce of the WMF: do they start as a mailing list or project page on a wiki, as in most of the Wikimedia world? Or are they more similar to the Wikimedia monthly activities meetings, where people were offered a pulpit to showcase their work and discuss it with colleagues? Nemo 17:20, 1 October 2019 (UTC)

Proprietary software in requirements

• "Proficiency in Excel, Google Sheets, or a similar spreadsheet application" (Evaluation Associate)
• "Familiarity with Google Sheets" (Fundraising Production Coordinator (Banner))
• "Comfortable working remotely using a wide range of tools for distributed collaborative work (e.g. Google docs, Sheets, Slides, Slack, Asana, Mural, etc)." (Director of Global Data & Insights)
• "Expertise in HTML and CSS for email, Adobe Creative Cloud or similar" (Fundraising Production Coordinator (Email))

This is backwards and antithetical to our values: WMF doesn't exist to promote proprietary products by Google, Microsoft, Adobe, Slack etc. It also feels like the job posting for some public sector job in the 1990s if you mention Excel and spreadsheets like an innovation. Just write "Proficiency in spreadsheets [and productivity software]" or "Proficiency in LibreOffice Calc or other spreadsheet software".

On the positive side:

• "Strong desire to learn and be part of free access and open source movement" (HR Operations Manager)

The term "free access" is a bit weird though, did you hold some focus group or did you have some other data to believe it's better understood by the target audience than our standard terms (free culture/free knowledge, or "open content" if you're of the "open" side of things). "Free knowledge movement" is correctly used in other job postings like Senior Copywriter. Nemo 08:28, 2 May 2020 (UTC)

Future HRIS functions

We hear from the job posting for HR Operations Manager about a

roll out of future HRIS functions to ensure resiliency of staff and leadership

It would be interesting to know what the overarching goals of this expected HRIS work are, as defined so far. It goes without saying that free/libre and open source software has priority, but advertising the goals now may make it easier to cooperate with other non-profits of similar size which could be interested in pooling resources to improve such software. Nemo 08:56, 2 May 2020 (UTC)