Thanks to everyone who worked on the report and thanks to Pono and Martin for the feedback there. It is important that we learn and that report and responses on this thread do significantly help there. Sorry to take so long to respond, but I wanted to make sure I had time to sit and read it all first.
One thing that doesn't work well over email, but if I was talking in person I'd do; and I think should be done is: Thanks to Martin for taking this on. Folks may think that his Patreon pays him to do Inkscape stuff, but that's just for development, work like this is his own time. Even though it may not have reached the conclusion we all wanted, it was a lot of time and effort and hopefully a stepping stone on the path. My big take away from the report and the conversation is that we're not great at communicating changes. We didn't have a lot of the stuff up front, and then we discovered some or things changed and we didn't get that information to the folks. For instance I look at the discussion on the HR relationship with SFC and remember that we worked a bit of that out in a PLC meeting, but we didn't document it at all and clearly the hiring committee didn't know about it. While I hope that the administrator that we're looking for will help here, I think we all need to be cognizant of the issue and work to spread info and document at any chance we get. Moving forward I think we have documents to write and someone needs to take on leading the process. Reading a bit between the lines (correct me if I'm wrong) it sounds like Martin is a bit burnt out by this round. Do we have someone on the PLC who's willing to take this project on? Ted On Sep 6 2022, at 6:24 pm, doctormo@gmail.com wrote:
Thanks Pono,
This a great set of information for a future hiring project. One point of order, the hiring comittee didn't take three months to come up with questions. They took 10 days, of the scheduled 7 days. The problem there was that their job was waiting on the SFC to collect resumés *before* starting that work, and you were correct in a previous video meeting that this work could have been done in paralelle to keep things moving.
For my own part, I would recommend that others learn from my failure. I had a schedule and I tried to publish it widely, but this apepars not to have been put into the right hands. I was also not firm enough in sticking to the schedule *and* the schedule was way too tight for a 501.3c. So I recommend a process be given 8 months to complete and to stick to the schedule even if there aren't many applicants. Keeping things moving forwards is way more important, especially when volunteers are waiting to do some of the work.
Regards, Martin Owens On Tue, 2022-09-06 at 06:31 -0700, Daniel Pono Takamori wrote:
Thanks for writing up this report! We're eager to learn from this experience and get the new hiring process up and running.
Here are some of our major takeaways:
- Being ready to move forward when we publish job posting: 3
months passed from the time that the job was posted until the time SFC received the finalized information and questions for candidates from the HC. Now having the questions ready will better prepare us for quick follow ups.
- Adding more resources: I added another few weeks of delay in
emailing out the questions to candidates, so that took us even further from the job posting, the result of both delays were that many of the candidates were no longer available. SFC now has an Operations Manager, Tracy, who will run this process.
- Keeping tasks as manageable as possible: Karen still advises
against anonymizing the resumes prior to the first round of questions. Ideally, the answers to the questions will be kept anonymous by the candidates and SFC will only have to take off identifying information when sending them to HC for evaluation. Resumes can be reviewed after assessing the replies to the questions and identifying the strongest candidates.
- Having a wider list of communities to advertise the posting to
from the get go, making a plan for promotion. Here's a list from Sage Sharp of Outreachy we can use next time:
"She Code Africa: https://shecodeafrica.org/jobs/
Blacks in Technology: https://www.blacksintechnology.net/jobs-board/
People of Color in IT: https://www.pocitjobs.com/
American Indian Science and Engineering Society: https://careers.aises.org/
Diversify Tech. Note that the jobs board has very strict rules around only posting technical jobs. They will also ask you questions about your organization's current diversity, and what you have done to make your organization more inclusive. https://www.diversifytech.co/post-a-job/
Techfugees. Note that most refugees supported by this organization are looking for full-time employment, not internships, but longer-term contractor positions might be interesting to them: https://techfugees.com/jobs/
Women Who Code: https://www.womenwhocode.com/jobs"
- Laying out a clear timeline so all parties have the same
expectations of the timeframe. Keep in mind that it is not unusual for especially nonprofits to have long hiring timelines. It's not ideal, but some famous 501c3 organizations are known for taking 3 or 4 months before contacting applicants the first time.
As mentioned above, having our Operations Manager take over the process in the future with clearer timelines will enable better management of expectations and more prompt responses to allow a better flow of information. When the project decides they want to reengage on this venture, we'll connect you directly with Tracy, and have her join the PLC and HC meetings. She will also be able to help with promotion of the posting to a wider audience.
Martin's report also asks for clarification of the legal relationship between the PLC, SFC and the hiring process. Because SFC is Inkscape's legal entity, all contractors are contractors of SFC, and we look to Inkscape for approval to hire the contractor and the budget. We partner with our member projects to design how this process works but so long as SFC has the confidence that the work is in mission for the org and that the resources are being reasonably spent without creating any conflicts or benefiting any individual or company unduly https://sfconservancy.org/projects/policies/conflict-of-interest-policy.html... , there are a variety of ways that could work out. At the end of the day, the contractor signs an agreement with SFC and it is SFC who reviews the invoices and makes payment. We require that contractors provide detailed reports of their work and almost always expect that to be done publicly too so that there's a transparency and accountablility to the community (links to examples: https://chris-lamb.co.uk/posts/free-software-activities-in-august-2022#repro... , https://anna.flourishing.stream/series/outreachy-reports/). Based on what we previous discussed at the meeting, SFC planned to help manage this contractor to assist the PLC and community make sure that they were on track. We expected to finalize how that would work out in futher discussions with the PLC.
Whenever you are all ready to pick this up again, we'll be excited to help! -Pono on behalf of Software Freedom Conservancy
On Sat, Sep 03, 2022 at 09:58:57PM -0400, doctormo@gmail.com wrote:
Dear Inkscape PLC,
Attached is the report directly from the hiring comittee, it contains a full detailed account of what happened, the steps everyone took and some recomendations for us in the PLC to consider.
Please do read the full report. It's not very long, but I think it contains a great deal of thoughtful information from our volunteer hiring comittee members.
My own additional recommendations is that the project not persue hiring a paid administrator until a HR person be available at the SFC to oversee the process. I do not believe that there was sufficient staffing at the SFC to process the time sensitive elements of this request we made of them. Thus long delays and ultimately starvation of the process.
The PLC may want to publicise this issue further to aid in full project transparency, but please go through the vectors team directly. I don't believe a further meeting is neccessary; The hiring comittee is henceforth disbanded.
And if I'm being honest everyone involved in this process is emotionally spent and we all require time and space to recover.
Best Regards, Martin Owens
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