Wikimedia New York City/Staffing plan/2017-2018

This is the 2017-2018 staffing plan for Wikimedia New York City (WM-NYC), a document which describes the way the organization handles its employees, independent contractors, or interns (collectively "staff"), and oversees their work. The document was first created in February 2016 during the preparatory work for the Grants:APG/Simple/Applications/Wikimedia New York City/2016 grant request.

Responsible body

The body responsible for managing the staff persons is the Board of Wikimedia New York City. The staff person will be given tasks from the Board or any other person appointed by the Board (to avoid confusion). Members of the Community can suggest tasks for the staffer only with the approval of the WM-NYC Board or responsible WM-NYC Board member. Such approval can be informal.

General obligations

Each staff person is obliged to:

Learn and respect the methods of work inside the Wikimedia and Wikipedia community and comply with these to avoid demotivation of the volunteer community, which is the biggest asset that our organization has.
Communicate with external subjects on a professional level, corresponding with the good practice, experience and brand of the Wikimedia movement and Wikimedia projects
Respond to any activities-related message (calls, e-mails or other transmission) if necessary within a reasonable time (80% of e-mails within 2 days, 100% of e-mails within 1 week).
Present a short monthly report of his/her achievements to the Board and to the community using the internal chapter wiki. Important reports will be also published on Meta or on Wikipedia when necessary.

Management

Each staff person will take care of his own tasks in the on-line management system. An open-source system (XXXXXXX Trello or Redmine) will be set up for the staffers so that the Board and also the rest of the chapter community will have a possibility to do an analysis of the work done by the staffer. This is especially important, as the amount of time the Board can provide for the staffer will be less than what the staffer can actually do as a paid or stipended person. Having all the staffer tasks available for the community will also provide communication with ease and also maintain transparency.

Personal meetings

The Board (or any person appointed by the Board) will maintain regular personal meetings with the staffers within an interval defined by the Board.

Currently, each proposed staff position has an staff manager who is well-oriented in the field of the employee's work. Each staff manager functions as a single first point of contact so that the staffer doesn't have multiple bosses and potentially conflicting tasking. This is Alice Backer ([one sentence CV]) for the AfroCrowd Program Manager and Megan Wacha ({one sentence CV]) for the Metrics and Reporting staffer. The chapter has a Metrics and Reporting committee, of which both staff managers are members, and therefore this board committee has general oversight of the staff positions.

Task workflow

Distribution of new tasks will be provided either by phone, e-mail or any other communication method (ie. Board meeting).

The staffer will file a new ticket for that task in the management system and publicly document the progress when working on the task.

Any task given to the staffer will be either:

Long-term task
Short-term task

The management system will distinguish between these two; long-term tickets will not be limited by time; short-term tasks will have a deadline. The management system will also distinguish among newly filed tickets, currently processed tasks and finished tasks. The staffer will be responsible for defining a ticket as a newly filed, currently processed or finished, based on the progress of his task. All the tickets will be available in the management system for editing by the Board and visible for the members of the chapter.

Contractor 1: AfroCrowd Program Manager (July 2017 - June 2018)

Primary task: AfroCrowd Program Manager

The primary task of the program manager, who was selected for her work in 2015, is to manage the AfroCrowd and related programs education programs which have grown to a level requiring non-volunteer forces, ensure their sustainable development and help these programs to expand to other institutions. Managing contacts with representatives of cultural and educational institutions - and with volunteers from the Wikipedia community - are an important part of this employee's work.

Secondary task: Internal communications manager

The program manager's secondary task, which was implemented in May 2017, is to manage the chapter's APG report and application programs. This change is necessary due the resignation of the chapter board member and secretary who performed, not only the duties of the secretary (not included in this new task, since that is an officer position), but many other tasks that helped the chapter immeasurably. These functions/tasks are very necessary for the chapter to function properly, efficiently, and professionally.

In this new role, the program manager will perform the following:

Manage all our Wikipedia and Meta pages
Manage our social channels
Create the narrative portions of APG and other grant applications
Create the narrative portions of APG midterm and final reports.
Update the event archives
Manage the official chapter calendar
Manage the chapter internal planning calendar

Staff time

The weekly work time will be divided into two major areas; (1) about 65%, or 13 hours on existing AfroCrowd tasks, and (2) about 35% or 7 hours on the new tasks supporting the chapter administratively. This appears to be doable since it is expected that the average time devoted to AfroCrowd related tasks will decrease (from 16 to 13 hours) as budgeted per week in the 2017-2018 fiscal and APG year. This is an immediate step to provide highly needed and required services in the short term to replace the work done by our former secretary. A long term goal exists to create, fund and hire an administrative assistant as a new staff position.

The total weekly work time will be as follows:

0.5 FTE = 20 hours of worktime / week

Contractor 2: Metrics Manager (July 2017 - June 2018)

Staff time

This position delivers metrics data and reports for three projects: The WM-NYC chapter, AfroCrowd (a separate organization financially sponsored by the chapter), and Art&Feminism (which is a separate organization with separate funding). However, the position is funded by WM-NYC from it's APG grant and thus provides economy of scale by avoiding 2 or 3 separate staff positions in the NYC area.

The total weekly work time will be as follows:

0.25 FTE = 10 hours of worktime / week

Wikipedia Asian Month (November 2017)

Wikipedia Asian Month is new to WM-NYC this year, and the proposed budget is here: Wikipedia Asian Month/2017 Budget with the position descriptions here: Wikipedia Asian Month/Position Description. These are not considered employee or contractor staff positions, rather international community members being offered a subsidy/honorarium.