I will add this to my ever-growing list of possible projects for Cascadia. There are a few other projects under consideration that have received little WMF support but I feel are movement-aligned and would interest the public or the contributor base.
In order for Cascadia to work on these projects there will be several steps such as getting AffCom approval for Cascadia, consensus of the Cascadians of what we want to do as a group, and finding people with the necessary technical expertise. I'm speculating that we might hire on a contract basis for short-term software projects if GAC or the FDC support that approach, or we might put out an RFP. In general I would say this sounds like a project we might want to support. A number of our members have technical, research, or GLAM interests. Of course, if WMCH wants to do this work and can do it faster than Cascadia, or someone makes a good proposal to work on this project through IEG or GSOC/OPW, that is ok. We in Cascadia are still very early in our development and we can find other work to do if we decide that we want to support movement-wide projects. Pine* * Speaking only in a personal capacity On Wed, Jun 25, 2014 at 8:54 PM, Erik Moeller <e...@wikimedia.org> wrote: > Hi folks, > > At the Zurich Hackathon, I met with a couple of folks from WM-CH who > were interested in talking about ways that chapters can get involved > in engineering/product development, similar to WM-DE's work on > Wikidata. > > My recommendation to them was to consider working on GLAM-related > tooling. This includes helping improve some of the reporting tools > currently running in Labs (primarily developed by the illustrious and > wonderful Magnus Manske in his spare time), but also meeting other > requirements identified by the GLAM community [1] and potentially > helping with the development of more complex MediaWiki-integrated > tools like the GLAMWiki-Toolset. > > There's work that only WMF is well positioned to do (like feeding all > media view data into Hadoop and providing generalized reports and > APIs), but a lot of work in the aforementioned categories could be > done by any chapter and could easily be scaled up from 1 to 2 to 3 > FTEs and beyond as warranted. That's because a lot of the tools are > separate from MediaWiki, so code review and integration requirements > are lower, and it's easier for technically proficient folks to help. > > In short, I think this could provide a nice on-ramp for a chapter or > chapters to support the work of volunteers in the cultural sector with > appropriate technology. This availability of appropriate technology is > clearly increasingly a distinguishing factor for Wikimedia relative to > more commercial offerings in its appeal to the cultural sector. > > At the same time, WMF itself doesn't currently prioritize work with > the cultural sector very highly, which I think is appropriate given > all the other problems we have to solve. So if this kind of work has > to compete for attention with much more basic improvements to say the > uploading pipeline or the editing tools, it's going to lose. Therefore > I think having a "cultural tooling" team or teams in the larger > movement would be appropriate. > > I've not heard back from WM-CH yet on this, but I also don't think > it's an exclusive suggestion, so wanted to put the idea in people's > heads in case other organizations in the movement want to help with > it. I do want WMF to solve the larger infrastructure problems, but the > more specialized tooling is likely _not_ going to be high on our > agenda anytime soon. > > Thanks, > Erik > > [1] > https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a2/Report_on_requirements_for_usage_and_reuse_statistics_for_GLAM_content.pdf > > -- > Erik Möller > VP of Engineering and Product Development, Wikimedia Foundation > > _______________________________________________ > Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: > https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines > Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org > Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, > <mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe> _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, <mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe>
