> > Yes, I think we *should* provide a focus for the event, and that the focus > should be on users, use cases, and what we as developers need to do to > achieve those things. > > In my opinion we haven't had a strong focus to the event in the past, and > it's limited what we accomplish there to largely making a set of technical > presentations and having a few discussions that either don't produce a > decision or don't have much affect on what actually happens after the > summit. > > (I'd be very interested also in some feedback on things that *have* worked > well at MWDS in the past, as I'd love to encourage anything that has been > productive! But I think we've not been successful in an architectural focus > so far.) > > -- brion
[Sorry about last email. accidentally hit send] Yes, we certainly do have issues with follow-through on summit decisions. For me personally, I've found the dev summits mostly useful as a community building type thing (For the MediaWiki developer community). As a remotee (Or at other various points in time, as a volunteer), its rare I actually see everyone in real life. The dev summit provides a venue to actually interact with everyone. While it may not actually be the best at resolving architectural issues, I feel like it helps me understand where everyone is coming from. In particular, I find that the dev summit is more effective for this purpose than hackathons, as the unstructured nature of hackathons tend to get people clumping in groups that already know each other. The dev summit on the other hand better provides for cross-pollination of ideas in my experience. (Don't get me wrong, I love hackathons too, just for different reasons). However, use-cases and users is why we're here, so I'm certainly not opposed to that focus. I just hope we continue to retain this as an event that's more talky and less hacky, as I feel that's where a lot of the uniqueness of the event came from. One aspect of the first MediaWiki architecture summit that I really liked but has been mostly lost, was inviting non-Wikimedia mediawiki users. They're a group that has use-cases that we don't often hear about, and provide a unique perspectives. Although I suppose its not surprising that their involvement has kind of been lost. I would love to see them come back, although I'm not exactly holding my breath for that. -- Brian _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
