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  • From: Seth Woolley <swoolley AT panasas.com>
  • To: Flavien Bridault <vlaaad AT sourcemage.org>
  • Cc: sm-discuss AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [SM-Discuss] A last question for the candidates
  • Date: Mon, 27 Mar 2006 11:32:22 -0800

I just got back in town and just noticed this question!

My response is that as a volunteer coordinator, the trick is to get them to take ownership of a particular role, which we kinda have already. There's nothing _more_ you can do about that, but I'll explain what I mean. We should treat them as if they are "hired" into it. If they stop doing work on it, they should lose the position. "Stop" doing work is different for each person and position and how much they have committed, but if they aren't living up to their end of the bargain, they need to feel the possibility of losing the position. This serves a few main purposes:
1) to motivate them to keep doing it or risk losing the title
2) to satisfy accomplishment of having done a consistent job
(when they do put this on their resume later our organization will
have more creedence than one who simply hands out unearned titles)
3) to allow somebody to replace them from their responsibilities

On the one hand, yes they are volunteers, but people volunteer to get something out of it as well as to give -- what they get out of it should be motivation enough to keep them going, but we have to make the carrot real -- we can only do this if we hold more people to the fire and get them out of our organization's title system sooner. At least, if they respond to requests for action with a reason that's temporary I wouldn't feel bad about letting them catch up to it later, but there comes a point when you haven't heard from them in a while and they don't appear to be doing what they need to be doing.

As far as, for example the build_api stuff, I wrote scripts to detect that that ran on a url autoupdated (but has since been taken down due to my move). While people were working on that, I reminded the chat room frequently (and the email list at times) of the work that needed to be done. After some time, there was diminishing returns and I had moved on to other things, too. We have come quite a ways with the build_api move, so I wouldn't call our work (or even Arwed's leadership) a failure. Some stuff was bound to slip through.

--
Seth Alan Woolley
Software Engineer
Accelerating Time to Results(TM) with Clustered Storage

www.panasas.com
swoolley AT panasas.com
510-608-4382




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