User:GYoung (WMF)/WMFJan2012Thoughts
Jan 2012 Thoughts
There’s something about settling into a new role that is like moving into a new home. This past month for me has been about learning and starting to order my priorities. It’s also about learning the rhythms of being in a new organization - like when meetings happen, and how is the organization engaged in the spring versus the fall (the office is emptier when Wikimania happens, for instance).
Engaging with cycles means jumping into the stream of the Foundation’s ongoing cycles. For instance, now WMF is going into its 2012-2013 annual planning process throughout the entire organization. One of my roles is to support that process, in having some of the conversations with organizational leaders about how org structure and design helps us execute to the organizational strategy that we lay out. I’m very pleased to be partnering with Garfield, our CFO, who is creating the financial planning structure and processes.
An early priority of mine was to get the core of my team in place. We have experienced, thoughtful human resource professionals who are well versed in issues key to WMF employees, like benefits. We hired a Director of HR, Joady Lohr. She comes to us from IDEO and BSR. Between Joady and Janice Tud (our HR generalist), it’s great to be building our in-house capabilities as we scale as an organization to make sure our people are taken care of.
One key project I’m delighted to impact early is our jobs site. The recruitment and engagement of high-quality folks who are mission-driven to work for the organization is one of my priorities. Check out jobs.wikipedia.org. We want to make it as welcoming as possible, and it will undergo more iterations. For example, next week, we’re doing a focus group with community members because we’ve gotten the feedback that from job descriptions and the jobs site, it wasn’t clear that we welcome having community members apply to staff. I’d like to change that, and make it very clear that community members are welcome to apply for roles in the organization and that community experience is considered an asset. On the internal side, we’re trying to make the hiring process more transparent and streamlined for managers, including helping managers in the organization think about what characteristics make for a great staff member.
Next up on my agenda as related to externally facing websites is the Staff and contractors page. I’ve gotten some great feedback from User:Thehelpfulone about how to make it more accessible, so it’s clear how the organization is structured and that there’s a good, accessible sense of what people do and who they are. Everyone I’ve met who works for the Foundation is passionate about our mission and has some unique aspect to their background and their hobbies. I think it’s important for those things to be more visible to the community.
One highlight of this week was to meet members of the WMF family from Brazil and India. As we start thinking about processes like “onboarding”, its worth making sure that contractors - especially our international ones - all have access to some of the same learning set. For example, Philippe did a fabulous talk this week on the structure of the movement and we plan to have Erik do a talk on Open Source and how core it is to WMF functioning, and that’s important for everyone to be grounded in.
There are a lot of other things I’m really excited about, and particularly passionate about, like leadership and staff development. Helping people be even more successful in their roles is ultimately what I think this job is all about, paying as much attention to the staff and their needs in the way that staff tries to pay attention to the needs of the community. I really couldn’t be happier to have this job!
Feedback, input, and questions are welcome. I’m still settling in and getting comfortable, so sometimes it may take me a bit to find an answer or develop them. We’re just starting to look at refreshing and re-articulating a lot of policies because they have to inherently be a bit different for a 100+ person organization than a 20 or 30 person org, but I aim to be available and will be doing things like blogging and publishing to make visible what I do.