Flow is going to be one of the extensions that the Collaboration team maintains, along with Echo and Thanks. "Not in active development" means that we're not going to build or change features, but we're going to fix bugs and make sure that people who are using Flow have a good experience with it.
It's a similar situation to Echo, which wasn't in active development for at least eighteen months, but we fixed bugs and made some changes to connect it up with Flow. We've recently started doing the prep work for global cross-wiki Echo notifications, which is another project that we're going to be working on in October. We talked about the Workflows project at Wikimania, introducing it as something that we were going to work on in early 2016. This priority change basically means that Workflows moves from "3 to 6 months from now" to next month. As people have noted, the Foundation spent money developing Flow discussion features, and we did the work in iterative stages, to make sure that there was a useable (if incomplete) product at every stage. That gave us the opportunity to get great feedback and see how people were using Flow, but it also just provides value on its own. Shifting priorities happens with product teams all the time, so you always want to be able to get to a stable place, and still have something worthwhile. Right now, there are several wikis that are enthusiastic about using Flow, on user talk pages, help forums and village pump-style discussion pages. Later this month, we're going to release the opt-in beta feature for wikis that request it, so that people can turn Flow on for their own user talk pages, and continue to get value out of the existing product. At that point, it's our responsibility to fix bugs and maintain it, so that we're not jerking the rug out from under the people who have been so helpful and important to the team. Danny On Fri, Sep 4, 2015 at 9:07 AM, Jonathan Morgan <jmor...@wikimedia.org> wrote: > On Fri, Sep 4, 2015 at 1:25 AM, Brian Wolff <bawo...@gmail.com> wrote: > > > > I seriously doubt any form of technology will solve the problem of > > independent groups with overlapping interests discussing things in > > multiple venues. > > > > My reading of the original email is that they want to work on things > > that have rather fixed bureaucratic procedures (e.g. Discussions about > > what content to delete). Relatively free-form discussion across many > > locations, seems like the opposite of that imo. I would love to hear > > in more detail what the team concretely plans to work on, although I > > imagine that's still in the process of being planned. > > > > > You're correct, as far as I know. I can't/won't speak for Danny about the > product roadmap (I'm sure he will jump in here again), but one component of > what's planned is indeed support for these so-called "bureaucratic > procedures". I did some initial research before Wikimania (still-drafty > wikipage report[1], internal presentation[2]), and Danny incorporated some > of this into his Wikimania presentation.[3] > > I've heard of several other components from the team, but "workflows" is > definitely part of it. > > Thanks to you, Pine, Risker and others for the good-faith assessments, btw. > > J > > 1. > > https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Flow/Community_process_workflow_interviews_(June_2015) > 2. > > https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/File:Flow_workflow_interviews_-_initial_findings_June_2015.pdf > 3. > https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/File:User(s)_Talk(ing)_-_Wikimania_2015.pdf > > > > -- > > -bawolff > > > > _______________________________________________ > > Wikitech-l mailing list > > Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org > > https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l > > > > > > -- > Jonathan T. Morgan > Senior Design Researcher > Wikimedia Foundation > User:Jmorgan (WMF) <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Jmorgan_(WMF)> > _______________________________________________ > Wikitech-l mailing list > Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org > https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l > _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
