Historically, the answers have been things like a desire to keep it in the community (given the number of software devs floating around), the hope that volunteer effort would come through, and me not having much experience with sites like those and thus relatively low affordance for that option. But I think if we pay for another major wave of changes, we’ll hire a freelancer through one of those sites.
(Right now we’re discussing how much we’re willing to pay for various changes that could be made, and once I have that list I think it’ll be easy to contact freelancers, see if they’re cheap enough, and then get done the things that make sense to do.)
[edit] I missed one—until I started doing some coordination work, there wasn’t shared knowledge of what sort of changes should actually be bought. The people who felt like they had the authority to design changes didn’t feel like they had the authority to spend money, but the people who felt like they had the authority to spend money didn’t feel like they had the authority to design changes, and both of them had more important things to be working on.
The people who felt like they had the authority to design changes didn’t feel like they had the authority to spend money, but the people who felt like they had the authority to spend money didn’t feel like they had the authority to design changes, and both of them had more important things to be working on.
This sort of leadership vacuum seems to be a common problem in the LW community. Feels to me like people can err more on the side of assuming they have the authority to do things.
If the money is there, why not just pay a freelancer via Gigster or Toptal?
Historically, the answers have been things like a desire to keep it in the community (given the number of software devs floating around), the hope that volunteer effort would come through, and me not having much experience with sites like those and thus relatively low affordance for that option. But I think if we pay for another major wave of changes, we’ll hire a freelancer through one of those sites.
(Right now we’re discussing how much we’re willing to pay for various changes that could be made, and once I have that list I think it’ll be easy to contact freelancers, see if they’re cheap enough, and then get done the things that make sense to do.)
[edit] I missed one—until I started doing some coordination work, there wasn’t shared knowledge of what sort of changes should actually be bought. The people who felt like they had the authority to design changes didn’t feel like they had the authority to spend money, but the people who felt like they had the authority to spend money didn’t feel like they had the authority to design changes, and both of them had more important things to be working on.
This sort of leadership vacuum seems to be a common problem in the LW community. Feels to me like people can err more on the side of assuming they have the authority to do things.
Yeah, a good default is the UNODIR pattern (“I will do X at Y time unless otherwise directed”)