A Job Description

Hiring a part-time system administrator has been a subject of discussion over the last few years. Here's a job description we came up with in February 2008.

The GNOME Foundation seeks candidates for a part-time system adminstrator 
position. The GNOME infrastructure cluster consists of a distributed network 
of machines providing services such as version control, bug tracking, web 
sites, and mailing lists to hundreds of part and full-time GNOME developers,
and to the GNOME user community. The system adminstrator will work with and
assist the volunteer GNOME sysadmin team to keep these services running smoothly,
securely, and reliably, and to implement enhancements.

This position is not primarily a coding position, however a certain amount of
programming ability is needed to be able to maintain and enhance the system 
adminstration scripts and custom web applications that run on the GNOME servers.

The successful candidate will:

 - Be able to conceive and execute projects independently without 
  detailed direction.

 - Have experience working with volunteer and geographically
   distributed communities.

 - Be technically strong with experience in many or most of the 
   following technologies:

   - Multiple GNU/Linux distributions
   - SQL databases
   - Python
   - PHP
   - LDAP

 - Have good communication skills in written and spoken English.

 - Be passionate about Free Software.

There are no specific educational requirements for this position, however
a typical candidate will have completed or be in the process of completing
an undergraduate degree. Several years experience maintaining production servers 
is mandatory.

Open Questions

The job description above is in no way final, and when it was discussed, there were various open questions. Is the desired candidate an Experienced contractor working a few highly-paid hours? part-time student working more lower-paid hours? How do we set goals and monitor performance? VincentUntz came up with the following useful bullet points for a possibe management tructure:

• weekly report sent to gnome-infrastructure
• at least monthly phone meeting (maybe more if people think it's a good thing) with a "manager". We need to decide who will play this role, and it's an open question right now.
• first contract should be something like 2 or 3 months, ie not too long (so we can look for someone else if we're not happy) and not too short to give the contractor some time to get used to the job.
• defined goals at the beginning of each period, that will help us evaluate if we want to renew the contract.

• it might be interesting to mention that the results will help us raise some money for the job. Therefore "good results" => "we'll be able to renew"

Relation to the format team proposal

How does this relate to the /FormalTeam proposal? here's no way that one part-time person can take care of both the routine tasks and new service development and deployment, so a volunteer team is still needed. I have trouble seeing how a paid position would integrate well with a volunteer sysadmin team unless the paid person acted as the sysadmin team leader. T This likely means that a good part of the job would be communication on IRC and similar. Rather than a "sysadmin superhero" we'd be looking for someone with good communication skills. What I have trouble seeing working out is hiring a person for 5-10 hours a week to handle a few specific tasks. - OwenTaylor