[HCoop-Discuss] On organizing people to get work done

[Philip Neustrom]

On Thu, May 7, 2009 at 12:19 PM, Adam Chlipala <adamc at hcoop.net> wrote:
> Chris Fallin wrote:
>> What are the estimated costs for paid staff?
>
> Beats me.  I would like to start some serious investigations into these
> sorts of figures.  This list thread is a precursor to figuring out
> exactly what we ought to investigate.
>
>> Do we intend to hire the
>> equivalent of a full-time employee or only part of one?
>
> I don't we need more than one half-time person (or multiple people
> adding up to that level of coverage), with the exception of emergency
> response.  Ideally, we'd have someone on call at any particular time,
> and hopefully we'd have few enough disasters that people would accept
> reasonably low pay for such positions.

In my experience -- in terms of building responsibility with an
individual -- it's probably best to aim for a single individual with
more hours rather than many people working for what ends up being
peanuts.

--philip

>
>> Do we have
>> room in the budget and, if not, by how much would dues have to
>> increase to cover the gap?
>>
>
> We have negative room in the budget for new expenses, so this would
> definitely mean significant dues increases.
>
>> If the dues increase, I am opposed to this: the attraction of HCoop
>> (for me, at least) is that it is cheap because we pool our resources
>> and have little overhead. It seems to me right now that it would be
>> very hard to pay for an employee with the scale and budget at which we
>> operate. I'd love to be proved wrong, though.
>>
>
> HCoop will always remain cheap insofar as cheapness comes from pooling
> resources.  However, some of our "low overhead" is phantasmal, since it
> comes from heroic donations of time by volunteers.  Over the last few
> years, the size of the set of people willing to volunteer has been
> decreasing steadily (even as the member base has grown significantly),
> and the enthusiasm and time commitment of those who remain has also been
> decreasing.
>
> The impact of this has been clear in our inability to implement any
> improvements to services, period, even to get up to basic levels that
> half of the members could get going in new machines in their basements
> in a day.  We've been lucky in our lack of serious data/hardware
> disasters, but the inadequacy of our staffing could definitely be
> revealed very clearly by such an occurrence.  Like I said in my last
> reply (to Michael Potter), I suggest that you may not be realizing how
> little you're getting now for your $5/mo..
>
> I recognize that members have different price sensitivities.
> Unfortunately for those of you who are very price sensitive, you depend
> on the volunteered time of others who tend to be disproportionately
> price-insensitive and demanding of their hosting providers.  Anyone who
> can do the kinds of admin things that happen at HCoop can be doing
> pretty well for himself monetarily in the commercial IT world, so such
> people tend to be quite willing to fork over extra dollars for better
> service.  Maybe HCoop should split into two separate organizations based
> on price sensitivity, but, ironically, I believe that all or almost all
> of the qualified volunteer admins would choose the more expensive side
> of the fork, leaving the pie-in-the-sky, low-price contingent with no
> one left to keep supplying the magic that keeps prices low.
>
> I use HCoop for a broad slice of all of my data storage and computing
> needs.  I'm willing to pay for reliability.  I'm also embarrassed by the
> low quality of our service ATM.  These factors combine to leave me
> pretty sure that, by a year from now, I won't be involved with any HCoop
> that doesn't have paid staff and charge significantly higher dues than
> we do now.
>
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