Agenda item for February SPI board meeting

[Josh Berkus]

Robert,

I'm in favor of getting paid help.  Currently we are entirely too
dependant on schultmc's time availability.  And we have the money.

> (1) Using a back office company
> 
> Numerous companies (in the US and elsewhere) provide back office support
> services.  A concern here would be obtaining a package that fitted with
> SPI's needs and was within SPI's budget.

A second issue, when it comes to check processing, is protection from
errors and malfeasance.

A third issue is that no such company will use free software without us
paying them lots of extra money to do so.

This deserves a fair amount of research by one or more SPI members.
Volunteers?

> (2) Hiring a part-time employee
> 
> Another option is to hire an office assistant on a part-time basis.  The
> office assistant could work for however many hours per week that was
> agreed with the SPI secretary (subject to upper limits set by the
> board). We may find, for example, that we only need an office assistant
> to work for 4 hours per week to achieve our aims.  The hourly rate of
> someone performing this task is likely to be quite modest.

The problem with extremely part-time employees is that they tend to be
no more reliable than volunteers, since they don't have a large
financial commitment in working for the organization.

I suggest that we could also investigate splitting a 100% full-time
assistant with some other OSS Foundations.

--Josh Berkus