On Fri, Sep 3, 2010 at 2:06 PM, OQ <overlo...@gmail.com> wrote: > Have to say this is the first I've heard of this channel existing. Yay > for communication.
It was only created very recently. On Fri, Sep 3, 2010 at 2:14 PM, Chad <innocentkil...@gmail.com> wrote: > As I've said elsewhere to people, this isn't an excuse for fracturing > the discussion. Using a single channel for development *and* support > has worked for *years* until the Usability Initiative decided it needed > its own channel. > > The channel is not actually that busy if you don't count the bots. And > for those of you who *really* don't like them, you can /ignore them. > I don't consider people asking for help "noise" either, it's part of > being engaged with the community. > > I don't see the need for a separate development channel at all. Me neither. We don't get that many support questions. On Fri, Sep 3, 2010 at 4:14 PM, Neil Kandalgaonkar <ne...@wikimedia.org> wrote: > Aryeh: first off I want to thank you again for the constructive criticism. And thank you for the thoughtful and constructive response. > 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. This is, as I said, one of the problems -- at least from the point of view of greater volunteer involvement. (That you share an office and go to lunch together, not that you're human beings. :) ) It's not necessarily prohibitive, in that you could certainly have totally healthy community development with lots of paid developers in one place, but it definitely lends itself to locking out volunteers. > 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. I don't know what you can call a private IRC chat where staff gets to hang out and non-staff does not, except deliberately hiding things. I can't speak for anything else because, well, it's hidden. I know it's hidden somewhere, because I don't see it, but I don't know where, or whether it's deliberate or not. > And in part that openness has practical limits, for exactly the same reasons > that a network card has limited bandwidth. There's no practical limit here. An approach where everyone communicates almost entirely by public e-mail is feasible. Any open-source project without a single well-funded controlling organization works that way by necessity -- the Linux kernel, Debian, etc. Some with such a controlling organization also work that way. > When Wikipedia started, it wasn't a perfectly distributed effort either; > they always had developers and people like Jimmy Wales in the same room. This certainly wasn't true in 2006, when I got commit access. There were two paid developers at the time, both of whom lived more than a thousand miles from Jimmy Wales. At that time there was no office at all, IIRC, but if there was, it was in Tampa -- Brion lived in San Francisco and Tim in Australia. > 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. Everyone *is* dispersed. For instance, the layout engine is owned by Robert O'Callahan (New Zealand), and its peers are Bernd Mielke (?), Simon Montagu (Israel), L. David Baron (Los Angeles area), Boris Zbarsky (Boston area). (Locations based on Googling, might not all be accurate.) Linked from the mozilla.com website: """ Most positions are based at our headquarters in Mountain View, California, but we also have offices in Tokyo, Paris, Toronto, Beijing and Auckland (with more to come!). Not near one of our offices? Mozilla thrives as an organization because of our diverse and distributed workforce, so remote employment is an option. """ http://hire.jobvite.com/CompanyJobs/Jobs.aspx?c=qpX9Vfwa As far as I can tell, very little happens at Mozilla face-to-face, compared to what's done by newsgroup/Bugzilla/IRC. I've subscribed to lots of Mozilla bugs and watched patches get submitted and reviewed, and I've never noticed much of anything that seemed to be hidden. Maybe because the patch author and reviewer usually live in separate parts of the world. Even if Mozilla weren't a perfect example, though, the Linux kernel is a case where virtually nothing important happens except by mailing list, which proves it's feasible in principle to run a large software project that way. I'm okay with discussing whether there might be efficiency or morale problems with not having most paid developers in a central office, but it's just not correct to suggest that it's impractical to develop software that way. It's entirely practical. You can efficiently produce high-quality software with practically all communication online and public. On Fri, Sep 3, 2010 at 9:05 PM, Neil Kandalgaonkar <ne...@wikimedia.org> wrote: > To his credit Aryeh is aware of this but he believes that the > productivity hit is worth it if it ensures the organization is 100% > transparent. I just don't agree we need to go to such lengths. I made seven suggestions. Only one was about actually dissolving the office, and I acknowledged that it might be extreme. What about the others? Why does the private IRC chat need to exist, for example? Why can't we have clear official statements that everything should be as public as possible and that volunteer developers should be treated as peers? Why can't teleconferences be replaced by public-logged IRC chats? Are these also too extreme? _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
