Mike Timko 4SL / 6SL Staff wrote: ↑Mon Apr 29, 2019 7:03 am
I am open to any suggestions if someone could think of a way to do a 0 hat position.
I was going to refrain from all further public comment and proceed solely through the bureaucratic process, however as a specific request was made...
One of the suggestions that I am putting forth next time I have a chance to edit my report (as I said, I already submitted it) is to allow people to volunteer without taking on a long term position. If people can sign up for a specific task of a specific project then it lowers the barrier of entry to help out. They can edit and review one document, or layout one document, or so forth. One of the problems of locking everything away to specific areas that people have to take minimum 6-month terms to help(1) is it reduces the pool of people available and makes people less likely to raise their hand.
When a new project spins up you open up a call for people to work on that specific project, get 2-3 people for each position and possibly more so they can cover each other if one falls ill or other issues befall one of them, and then when the project is complete, they stand down.
In the corporate world, we call these people contract workers and there are several advantages to them:
- Less staff full-time staff is needed to be productive (which can still oversee and ensure the quality remains high)
- It lowers the barrier of entry and creates a more open and collaborative environment within the RMN
- it addresses the (IMO unfounded) fears that a proper crowdsourced solution would cause chaos and more delays and frustration than the current system
- It reduces the likelihood of people being unavailable for the job; because these are short term projects a person who volunteers is more likely to be clear on their schedule than someone who attained a post many months ago.
- because a person is signing up for one specific project they are not taking on nearly as much responsibility; "editor of _____" is much more narrow in scope than "editor" and I find people are much more likely to volunteer for a specific task than they are for a long-term position.
The club could benefit greatly by making sure there are lots of small opportunities to contribute without a big commitment. I think projects like this should be a prime candidate for that given their low-impact internal nature and that their release is deemed low priority enough that there they get re-written after being fully approved instead of being released and allowing a version 2 to come out at a later date.
Of course, it seems there is no objection to releasing the text to the wiki, so we could just do that and we'll get the PDF when it comes
(1) Or whatever the minimum length for a post is, the most recent requests I've seen all stated 6-months, hence my usage.