On 11/06/2013 06:35 AM, Antoine Musso wrote:
I would have a look at the way IETF is handling its RFC process. I wrote
about it back in July in the thread "proposed RFC process":
http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2013-July/070241.html
The IETF does have a long, successful track record. But I'm not sure
this is really a good fit for a single software project.
The workflow is as bureaucratic as you can imagine given the number of
parties involved and all the political / commercial context that goes
behind creating internet standards. You can still achieve a RFC pretty
"quickly".
It has to be more structured, since the scope is so big. The IETF's
overall scope is basically, "Any standard relevant to the Internet", so
they can't simply let the whole technical community on every issue on a
single mailing list. First, people who are experts in audio codecs
(https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6716) are a very different set from the
QoS experts (https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-dime-qos-parameters).
MW is much smaller, so it doesn't have the same problem. Such working
groups could work here, but we wouldn't want a new group every time
there was an RFC. However, having front-end working groups, database
working groups, Wikidata working groups, etc. might work.
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Requests_for_comment/LESS
Working group was Ori Livneh, Jon Robson, Steven Walling. They came with
a draft and implementation after a few review cycles.
Along the process Brion stepped in to offer technical reviews/guidance.
Brion eventually accepted it by marking the RfC complete and merging the
implementation.
I don't think this example supports the need for formality. In this
case, Ori proposed a POC change, the RFC was created to document why it
would be useful and discuss the proposal, a lot of people commented on
both the code and the RFC, and Brion eventually merged it.
I don't think it would have been better with more discussion before
coding, or with more formality (e.g. who is in the working group, versus
just a participating engineer).
Matt Flaschen
_______________________________________________
Wikitech-l mailing list
Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
