User talk:GayleKaren/WMF Recruiting Strategy Project

I am fascinated that I find myself thinking about this project when I wake up first thing in the morning, whenever I have time in the car, wherever there is some spare mental space because the challenges of picking apart how to build a company with broad challenges and specific contexts is inherently interesting. GayleKaren (talk) 19:13, 17 November 2011 (UTC)

I understand better what Garfield meant by the differentiation between information versus data. One challenge both in the project and for the organization is to sort through existing data (like the plethora that exists in HR_Corner of the internal office wiki) and supporting meaningful information extraction for others in the organization to support organizational processes. GayleKaren (talk) 19:11, 19 November 2011 (UTC)

As I think about what would alleviate the issue of people feeling the stretch of having nearly tripled in size in the last couple of years, a solution requires fun, shared experiences where people have to work together across teams or where people can see each other's work in ways they appreciate. I would strongly recommend something like Go Games for the next All Hands meeting, building Wikipedia search elements into it, and also using part of the game with mini-surveys to do a values assessment of organizational culture based on the work of Dr. Scott Bristol, a professor at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. The reason I'd try to bake the assessment into the game is to make it fun and a collaborative experience, while fulfilling the task of actually generating useable data. The other idea is to host an unconference, which I've done before as one of the planners behind the BIL unconference two years ago. GayleKaren (talk) 02:15, 20 November 2011 (UTC)

FYI, I use the Oxford comma, not only from long years of habit but also because this comic cemented the need for it. GayleKaren (talk) 09:04, 21 November 2011 (UTC)

This 15 Banned Google Interview Questions article that came out today reminded me of a point I've been thinking about that doesn't really fit into the report. A friend told me that Facebook and Google do phone screenings that involve Trivial Pursuit-like questions like "Tell me about Linux kernal blah blah..." His conclusion is that they're hiring to create a culture of geek knowledge rather than an organization. It's a very different question than, "What have you done that you're particularly proud of?" Cyn also had me contemplating the characteristics of a knowing organization versus a learning organization. GayleKaren (talk) 22:56, 21 November 2011 (UTC)

I was watching the TED talk by Yochai Benkler which mentioned Wikipedia as representing the next stage of human development. If an organization uses a traditional, hierarchical organizational structure that comes, not out of the information age, but from the industrial era, to support an organization like the Wikimedia Foundation that inherently attempts to inhabit a servant leadership mindset, it is not going to work.

There need to be ways of surfacing and processing tensions, defined one way as the sense of a specific gap between current reality and sensed potential. For people in many organizations, the way they deal with it, without effective (or any) processes, is disassociation, contraction, and apathy. An organization best evolves through the continuous process of tensions as related to the functioning of the organization. That has actually been the story of the Wikipedia movement. The "operating system" (OS) of an organization. We don't live in a predict-and-control world, but most organizational systems do.

Most organizational charts organize people into hierarchies. There are three types of structure for any organization - the formal structure, as represented in an org chart, the extant structure, which is the one that is actually operating, and the requisite structure, the structure that "wants to be". (Incidentally, the Wikipedia article "requisite structure" badly needs a rewrite.)

The reason this is relevant is because over time, it does shift the viewpoint of what one is hiring for and what one is hiring into. GayleKaren (talk) 00:08, 22 November 2011 (UTC)