On 16/01/15 15:04, Rob Lanphier wrote:
Still, the uncomfortable shrugging continues. The group is broader, but still lacks the breadth, particularly in front end and in the development of newer services such as Parsoid and RESTBase.
It appears that we won't be able to keep the members we have, let alone broaden our membership. Mark has said that it's not worth his time, Brion hasn't attended a committee meeting since November, Daniel has given hints that his involvment might not continue, and Roan has been deeply skeptical from the outset. I think I am the only one who is committed to it, and that is out of a sense of duty rather than rational reflection.
The problem is that the work is mostly administrative and not empowered. Committee members are skeptical of many of the current ideas floating around at the moment, and have their own ideas about what things should be priorities, but have no expectation that those ideas will be considered for resourcing.
We review the technical details of design proposals, but I think most committee members do not find that to be engaging. We've all reviewed things before, and will presumably continue to do so regardless of whether we are on a committee. We could veto technical details as individuals, so what is the committee for?
I believe no one would dispute the credentials of every member of the group. Brion, Tim, and Mark have an extremely long history with the project, being employees #1, #2, and #3 of the WMF respectively, and all having contributed massively to the success of Wikipedia and to MediaWiki as general purpose wiki software. In most open source projects, one of them would probably be BFDL[5]. Roan and Daniel are more "recent", but only in relative terms, and also have very significant contributions to their name.
It's not a community open source project, it is an engineering organisation with a strict hierarchy. We don't have a BDFL, we have a VPE.
On the leadership front, let me throw out a hypothetical: should we have MediaWiki 2.0, where we start with an empty repository and build up? If so, who makes that decision? If not, what is our alternative vision? Who is going to define it? Is what we have good enough?
Sorry to labour the point, but the way to go about this at present is pretty straightforward, and it doesn't involve the architecture committee. You just convince the management (Damon, Erik, etc.) that it is a good thing to do, get yourself appointed head of the "MediaWiki 2.0" team, hire a bunch of people who agree with your outlook, get existing engineers transferred to your team. It's not even hypothetical, we've seen this pattern in practice.
-- Tim Starling _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
