On Mon, 03 Sep 2012 12:59:19 -0700, Oren Bochman <orenboch...@gmail.com>
wrote:
A number of comments:
1. The community is an a massive untapped resource for development. (They
like to edit wikis, upload photos and also to code....)
e.g. The amount of Template Code in about 20 times the size of
MediaWiki code base.
2. I would seriouly look at maximizing its potential before allocating
more
funds for paid devlopment.
Volunteers have very little spare time, WMF employees' 20% time is also
small, many of our bugs and large features are not useful to WMF's goal,
and many of them are large enough simply by unavoidable fact that people
avoid starting them when they only have spare time to work with.
How is trying to 'maximize [the] potential' of an unrewarded group of
people -- who are here on their own terms, not to be expected anything of
-- going to help when many of the features we're expecting to get done are
too big for someone to do in their spare time?
We can try to fix the issues with getting the community involved. But I do
not believe that doing that excludes also fixing the gap we have of people
who have enough time to complete the large features we are missing. They
are not mutually exclusive so there is nothing stopping us from doing both.
2.1 This means making it much easier to develop/test/deploy to Live
wikis.
(Short Tutorials, Code Samples, Documentation)
2.2 Create a culture where new coders are assigned to work with
experinced
coders to fix and maintaining existing code.
2.3 Motivating paid developer to work (i.e. review and direct) the
community....
2.4 Team up with Wikia and WikiHow Devteams on common features and on
small
wiki testing.
Wikia has been trying to get some of their tweaks in lately. But in
general they build custom stuff for anything they want. I'm not sure how
much we can even collaborate with them on.
3. Looking at the metrics - The Mediawiki team is still not setup to do
developement like other leading Open Souce development communities.
Git is a step in the right direction but - the agility of the teams
is
too low to collaborate at the levels required.
to accept "AnonymousDonation" of source from the community.
While I applud Sumana who does a great job with the community - this
works needs to be followed though organicaly by all members of the
development teams
or we will continue sending the community the message - that we
prefer
to delay fixing bugs, pay a premiunm for new features etc ...
This could be aided by having a MediaWiki Foundation, rather than be a
reason to not have one.
If the community had an idea of what replacement for Gerrit would work the
foundation could hire someone to make it into something that could replace
Gerrit and improve the experience.
If there were a MediaWiki Foundation and people liked my Gareth idea, I
wouldn't be opposed to working semi-full-time to turn it into a
ready-to-use piece of software.
4. Only once such issues are adressed would it become productive to
engage
more developers with WMF or external funding.
5. The one point I do agree with is that features the community asks for
should be given due proirity and this process should be more transparent.
Oren Bochman
On Mon, Sep 3, 2012 at 8:10 PM, Mr. Gregory Varnum
<gregory.var...@gmail.com
wrote:
I'll post more on the RFC, but I wonder if an entity within WMF would be
more appropriate and realistic. Utilizing the existing operations
structure
would be far easier. Perhaps setup something like FDC to oversee
priorities
and funds.
My hunch is WMF would be far more likely to sign off on something they
retain a sense of sign-off on for the sake of maintaining the WMF
projects
than having to deal with an independent entity that would have the legal
right to go rogue one day and not do what's in the best interest of the
WMF
projects. I recognize to some extent that's the point, but looking down
a 5
year road of possibilities, is that something we'd ever want to
happen? My
feeling is no and allowing WMF to maintain some level of authority in
the
development of MediaWiki is in our collective best interests. From
project
management, fundraising, usability, system resources and paid developer
support perspective.
I would instead propose a MediaWiki department or collective (insert
your
favorite term here).
-Greg aka varnent
____________
Sent from my iPhone. Apologies for any typos. A more detailed response
may
be sent later.
On Sep 1, 2012, at 10:42 PM, MZMcBride <z...@mzmcbride.com> wrote:
> Daniel Friesen wrote:
>> Done in true developer style "[RFC] MediaWiki Foundation":
>>
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Requests_for_comment/MediaWiki_Foundation
>
> Thank you for this! This is exactly what I had in mind.
>
> It's interesting, with a lot of (proposed) non-profits, the biggest
concerns
> are engaging volunteers and generating income. With this proposed
> foundation, I think most of the typical concerns aren't in play.
Instead, as
> Nikerabbit so deftly commented on the RFC's talk page, the big
question
is:
>
> What projects would a MediaWiki Foundation work on and how would those
> projects be chosen?
>
> This seems to be _the_ crucial issue. Getting grants from the
Wikimedia
> Foundation or Wikia or others doesn't seem like it'd be very
difficult.
> Assuming there was broad support for the creation of such a foundation
from
> active MediaWiki developers (and related stakeholders), getting the
> Wikimedia Foundation to release the trademark and domain also doesn't
seem
> like it would be very difficult. But there's a huge unresolved
question
> about how, out of the infinite number of project ideas, a MediaWiki
> Foundation would choose which ideas to financially support.
>
>> As you command oh great catalyst[1].
>> [1] Hope you don't mind. I found it amusing. And it kind of fits in a
>> positive way.
>
> Cute. :-)
>
> MZMcBride
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
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> Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org
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~Daniel Friesen (Dantman, Nadir-Seen-Fire) [http://daniel.friesen.name]
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