Aryeh: first off I want to thank you again for the constructive criticism. I work at the WMF's SF location, and I do agree that some the problems you're talking about are serious. I do worry sometimes about the tension between centralization and community development. I don't want to be part of something that, in creating a new resource for Wikimedia, also begins to neglect the community that gave rise to it.
On 9/3/10 10:39 AM, Aryeh Gregor wrote: > The problem isn't necessarily the actual content of what we can't > see, but the mere fact that so much is clearly hidden. It draws a > line that need not exist. I wasn't part of the WMF until recently, but I don't think this is a reasonable request to make. I think you are not really appreciating that the WMF employees are also human beings. We share an office. We go out to lunch together every day. If you banned one form of private communication, others would spring up. If you eliminated the WMF's SF location, then the limiting factor would become who has the ability to go to conferences, or the people that tech leads like communicating with, and so on. Your argument is that there should just not be any chance for such imbalances to arise. But like it or not, as long as the servers and the money are under control of a single organization, there will always be a hierarchy of who's "in the know" and who isn't. And people like yourself are going to have to remind us when we are failing to be as open as we could be. This is never going to get solved permanently, we can only keep evolving. Frankly I think you are better off with people from the tech community actually being in the WMF offices. It's really the managers and the fundraisers who, sometimes being non-technical and having only a short history with the Foundation, are most likely to misunderstand the community, despite their best intentions. In other words, having geeks in the office to advocate for your concerns is a bigger plus than you realize. And starting this discussion is a great example of that. I can already see it's become more of a "top of mind" issue at the WMF. To some extent we were already thinking about these concerns (see Danese's email) but maybe this will accelerate change. > When you hide things from volunteers, you cannot turn around and blame > them for inaccurate speculation about what you've hidden. I don't see anyone deliberately hiding things. It's more the case that we don't have established procedures about how to be open, in a regular, repeatable fashion. We try really hard but the efforts are always competing with just trying to get things done. And in part that openness has practical limits, for exactly the same reasons that a network card has limited bandwidth. > But somehow most open-source projects do very well without them, > including projects much bigger and better-funded than MediaWiki. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias You're not counting all the ones that imploded because of a lack of in-person, high-bandwidth communication with collaborators. Most open source software projects die early. When Wikipedia started, it wasn't a perfectly distributed effort either; they always had developers and people like Jimmy Wales in the same room. I don't really know, but I would guess that this was crucial to their initial success. Also, few people are able to make things like usability or design work in a distributed fashion. I don't know of any open source project that's made that work. We could try harder, maybe publish some design guidelines, or figure out some way to allow remote developers to test interfaces cheaply. But I expect there will always be a need for some centralization there. > I can say that despite being a nobody at Mozilla and having gotten > only one (rather trivial) patch accepted, I feel like I'm taken more > seriously by most of their paid developers than by most of ours. You are making a lot of references to the Mozilla organization (directly or obliquely) so we might as well address that. I asked a friend of mine who works at Mozilla and he said that they have exactly the same problems that you discuss -- there are many people who regularly complain about how the organization isn't open enough. As an outgrowth of a Silicon Valley company, that relies on advertising revenue, they are far more like a traditional software organization. My friend was even working on a secret project (Rust) for months before it was announced, which would be unacceptable to Wikimedia. That said: they obviously have the longest experience in balancing between centralized and community development, and we can learn a lot from what they do. Especially since you report you enjoyed your experience as a first-time committer. It is my impression that the reason they are able to be so open and communicate well about roadmaps and so on is because they do have enough resources (centralized) to do such coordination and make sure to publish documents and do press releases and whatnot. If everyone was dispersed I don't think they'd be very successful at this task. > Except that volunteers can't do the work on some projects, because > we're treated as outsiders and aren't interested in committing lest we > be summarily reverted. Actually, even as a paid developer, I feel the exact same way about all of MediaWiki and Wikimedia. It is pretty difficult to contribute to anything here; the developer takes on the entire task of educating themselves about what to do, and the way people start a conversation with you is by telling you that you're an idiot / reverting your changes. This is why I've refrained from checking in a lot of things even on a project where I am pretty much the sole developer. I also have the experience of finding "secret" IRC channels where important communication and socialization happens. I didn't know about half the IRC channels that you all use regularly until I'd been here for months. So I agree there's a problem but I don't agree it is specifically about the WMF or the SF office. We need to be looking into realistic policies and procedures that enable everyone to trust each other better. I know that this is possible because I've worked on projects that did have problems like you state, and how they were fixed. -- Neil Kandalgaonkar ( <ne...@wikimedia.org> _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
