Hm. I wonder if the engineering community liason role could be adapted to address the suggestIons here. Also I would like to know what the liasons currently do besides file bug reports and respond to dev process questions, which are good to do but not what I would call strategic change management. I think the role of this department is under development anyway after Rachel's arrival so this is a good time for the questions raised in this thread. I'm pinging Rachel to ask her to comment.
MzMcbride, I'm not sure that WMF is overstaffed, but I would like to see more specific performance metrics for some groups. The FDC commented on this as well and I hope WMF is taking that to heart. I'm pinging Garfield for comment on that portion of this discussion. Pine On Aug 5, 2014 5:53 AM, "MZMcBride" <z...@mzmcbride.com> wrote: > Fæ wrote: > >On 5 August 2014 11:33, Gryllida <gryll...@fastmail.fm> wrote: > >>WMF Engineering is currently composed of individual teams as documented > >>at https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Engineering . These teams > >>look after the software that faces us everyday, and often work together. > >> > >> Could we please have some more people (potentially a dedicated > >>‘community’ team) who could do these things: > >> - encourage feedback by absolutely /anyone/ about the next features > >>they'd like, > >> - run programming and documentation activities requested (or started) > >>by community [there would be a lot of small projects, unlike the big > >>ones the current Teams are working on], > >> - encourage localising documentation for, and centralising the location > >>of, all community-developed programming work, > >> - raise awareness of community development efforts across all Wikimedia > >>projects, > >> - actively encourage members of community become MediaWiki and Gadgets > >>hackers in the Free Software philosophy? > >> > >> This would be, in my view, a relatively small, collaboration-type team > >>(with just half a handful of people for timezone coverage for IRC > >>support). > >> > >> Open to brainstorming and suggestions. I would compile thoughts into a > >>wiki page afterwards to continue thinking on the idea. > > > >The roles you describe seem to have a lot of overlap with what we > >might expect WMF volunteer coordinators / WMF community liaison > >employees to be busy with. > > Theoretical overlap, perhaps. People in the role of "Community Liaison, > Product Development and Strategic Change Management", a title Orwell would > be proud of, are not doing what's being described in this e-mail. The > current community liaisons are really paid advocates and they're tasked > with shilling bad products. This isn't the fault of the people in these > roles, many of whom I know and respect, but we should be honest that their > role is much closer to that of a marketer or public relations person. > > Substantive, meaningful communication between the people building software > and the people using software is the goal, but the current implementation > dramatically fails, as a number of software projects from the past two > years have demonstrated and continue to demonstrate. > > And of course there are separate "community advocacy" and "engineering > community" teams. The Wikimedia Foundation staff is heavily bloated and I > very much doubt that hiring additional staff will improve matters. > > Gryllida's proposal has merit, but implementing it probably requires more > than a small team. Part of the issue is that thousands of editors' views > are discounted in favor of the latest hare-brained ideas from Wikimedia > Foundation middle management. And while many of these ideas can be, and > eventually are, killed or mitigated, it's draining work that's likely more > easily accomplished with a larger pool of focused energy. > > MZMcBride > > > > _______________________________________________ > 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>
