response 1 of 28:

Feb 21 21:34 UTC 1998

Well, having been the most recent "victim" of the long process for deciding
on staff members (at least, staff members who have root), I didn't mind the
process at all.  I fully expected it to take longer than it did, Grex being
what it is.  I'm not sure that the process can or should be speeded up much.
In the case of Party ADM, as Valerie pointed out, we don't really need to wait
for the board, but the rest of it was sort of necessary.

response 3 of 28:

Feb 22 18:10 UTC 1998

i believe it is appropriate for a staff member to be selected by the staff
for each individual appointment process who would administer that process.

then that staff person could set up a schedule including a period in which
volunteers would be noted, a period in which appropriate skill assessments
can be made, a period for appropriate feedback from other poeple with whom
the appointee would have to work, and a deadline for final approval.

setting and publicizing this schedule would eliminate a lot of the frustration
of simply not knowing.

also, i think it is healthy for the organization to establish a precedent of
adhering to a schedule, allowing of course plenty of time within that
schedule for unplanned delays which occur simply because this is a volunteer
orgAnization and people have lives outside of it that have to take priority
at times.

this promotes accountability, along with the notion of taking responsility.
Grex is a large and complex system, and as it grows it becomes more important
to its survival to add more structure to its operations.  

there is more to this idea that i haven't expressed, but if there is interest
then i'll be happy to explore it further.

response 5 of 28:

Feb 22 19:27 UTC 1998

I wouldn't go so far as to say a schedule is *necessary*, but I think Eric is
correct that a schedule might alleviate some of the frustration.

response 7 of 28:

Feb 24 20:22 UTC 1998

Which means what -- no more than 6 weeks time lapse between the decision to
appoint new nominees and the time for everyone to have met to discuss it?

Lessee: say we decide on the fouth Thursday of a month to appoint new staff
positions.  There would be 2 weeks before the next staff meeting to take
nominations.  Staff can then discuss the issues and watch the finalists for the
next two weeks.  Then they make their recommendation at the next board meeting
and the announcement can be made the next day.  Four weeks. 

Move the date we decide we need a new staffer to the day after a staff meeting
and you add two weeks total.

That sounds about right because the staff and board may not be familiar with
the best people to fill specific positions.  The delay, frustrating as it is,
gives us a chance to get to know them.  It actually increases the chances of
someone relatively unknown getting appointed since there isn't as much need to
stick with people who are known quantities as there would be if the decision
had to be made in a hurry.

I'd say the best way to handle the frustration is to say "it takes 6 to 8 weeks
for our decision making process.  We'll either make an announcement of the
appointees at that time or publicly discuss the issues that are causing a
delay.

I think discussing the appointees publicly is a bad idea.  In most cases there
are too many fine candidates for the positions available, but occasionally the
staff has information that isn't (and shouldn't be) public knowldege that would
cause them to hesitate until they know a person better. 

I'd hate for a good potential candidate to be raked over coals publicly because
they aren't quite as ready as another person.  After all, they might very well
be the very best choice next time around when they have that little bit more
experience.  If people have said unpleasant things about them during their
first nomination for staff how likely are they to be willing to submit a second
time?

response 9 of 28:

Feb 24 21:58 UTC 1998

Yes of course there will be the occasional wrong choices made.  That's
inevitable and I'm not suggesting that we should extend the discussion
indefinitely so we can get intimately aware of everyone's tendencies, traits,
and quirks.  Six weeks seems about right to me because it has the frame of
regularly scheduled meetings to limit it but is long enough to do a little
research.

The problem with staff just dealing with not being in the know is that they
have a responsibility to the rest of us to protect GREX from people who might
be malicious or terminally clueless enough to take it down in a way that will
take hours, days, or months of staff time to recover from.

Almost no one would do that, either intentionally or not.  But that one in a
million is worth watching out for just because the very act of being cautious
reduces the chances somewhat of that sort of person being nominated in the
first place.

I guess what I'm taking too many words to say is that caution, even though it
may not be really needed in any specific instance, is always a good idea.  So
far we have a pretty good track record of getting good people involved.  I'd
just like it to stay that way.

response 11 of 28:

Feb 25 00:37 UTC 1998

Yeah, and then there is always one in every bunch (me) who feels secrecy
is not always the best way to go and is usually used to meet the needs of
those making the decisions not to protect the applicant.  Candidates
should be able to hear what is being said about them and respond, if
necessary.  

response 13 of 28:

Feb 25 02:48 UTC 1998

All the way with G-R--E---X!

response 15 of 28:

Feb 25 18:25 UTC 1998

It is the usual practice to make appointments in closed session. The
reason is not exactly to not hurt candidate's feelings but rather to
let those making the appointments discuss personal and private aspects
of the candidates without making them public - to protect personal privacy.
It does also serve to not hurt candidates feelings if the "negatives"
have to be discussed, but that is not the practical reason for doing it.

response 17 of 28:

Feb 26 08:36 UTC 1998

The "usual" practices are what has been found to be most effective over
many years and organizations. Actually, Grex does most things the usual
way....but likes to deny it. 

Organizations do most of their selections for apponintments in closed
session because of all the train wrecks that result from not doing so.  I
have never seen a "very disciplined and mature decision making group" in
my life. Groups consist of human beings. 

response 21 of 28:

Mar 1 08:19 UTC 1998

It is not *necessarily* a problem if the selection process is
frustrating to candidates who fail the "ability to deal with stressful
situations in a graceful fashion" clause, above.  If the goal is to
recruit qualified candidates, and dealing with stressful situations is
important, then the selection process may actually be doing a perfectly
good job of fulfilling its mission, if it is occasionally frustrating.

 The first step in improving a process, is to answer what the process is
supposed to do, "correctly".  The primary goal of the staff recruiting
process is *NOT* to be less frustrating to candidates.  If that were the
only goal, then there are perfectly simple solutions to make it less
frustrating; for instance, the newuser program could just make each new
person a staff person, and one of the jobs of the treasurer would be to
mail off a pumpkin room key, and root password, to each new user on
grex.  Alternatively, we could have the treasurer go out to the diag on
the first day of each month, and and hand out envelopes containing keys
& the root password, to each person to asks.  (gosh, April fools day is
coming up, isn't it?) :-)

I think the *primary* goal of the staff selection process is to recruit
and "hire" "qualified" people.  A *secondary* goal is to avoid scaring
off potential recruits, or to unnecessarily annoy unqualified
candidates.  These are only important because you can't hire people
you've annoyed, and you don't want annoyed people causing unnecessary
problems.

Once the process has been adequate defined, then methods for improving
it can become a lot more obvious.  To take a trivial example, although
Valerie says what I said above was "sensible", I think if we were to
tease apart some of what I said above regarding "technical ability" and
"stressful situation", we'd find that we have some surprising
differences in terms of what we would value in a potential staff member.
That presents some obvious problems in terms of coming to a consensus
regarding the suitability of a potential staff recruit.

Another improvement we might find we need to do would be to minimize the
"surprise" factor when recruiting people.  When asking for volunteers,
for instance, we might make it a habit to include boilerplate that says
something like "grex staff reserves the right to reject any or all
candidates, or to pick somebody entirely different who never volunteered
publically".  Or, if we come to a different understanding about the
purpose of recruitment, we might decide that it's important to require
that each staff member volunteer publically, or that it's acceptable to
recruit people we don't, in fact, trust, or that, as has been suggested
previously, it's just as important to be a "sysadmin" teaching type of
place as to be an end-user service, and therefore, recruiting manifestly
unqualified people is "most" important.  [ This is why deciding what the
mission statement of the process is, is important - it makes it
*possible* to evaluate conflicting values such as ({service to users}
vs. {fairness of recruitment process}). ] In any event, if we can give
people a better idea as to what to expect, then they are likely to be
less disappointed if they are not, in fact, selected, or if the
selection process appears to be taking a long time.

I have a relative who works in the personnel department of a large law
enforcement organization.  For a while, part of her job involved helping
to hire new recruits for the organization.  It was quite fascinating to
hear what they did.  For instance, one of the problems they had was to
identify folks who wanted to be hired because they liked the idea of
being basically bullies with big guns.  You can't, of course, ask people
"do you want to be a bully with a gun?" -- so as I recall, they had a
very elaborate system designed to detect this kind of thinking, and to
quietly shunt these people out of the recruitment process.

response 23 of 28:

Mar 2 09:19 UTC 1998

is that as in martha reeves and the vandettas?