I'd like to thank the GNOME community for how you nurtured me into the FLOSS contributor I am today. I'd also like to give back a bit -- I'm working a lot less on GNOME-related program activities, but I still watch with interest and I encourage connections that benefit GNOME where I can. I'm now the Engineering Community Manager at the Wikimedia Foundation, and the Wikimedia technical community has some of the same challenges and opportunities as GNOME. So below, some lessons learned, in gratitude.
Some problems GNOME and Wikimedia tech share (as I've specifically seen discussed on the GNOME foundation-list in the last few years), and how we're facing them: Receiving funds internationally: we have a pretty complicated setup. Check out https://wikimania2012.wikimedia.org/wiki/Submissions/Fundraising:_Under_the_Hood and the video at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=21lR4kYXRmw for an overview. We try to be very transparent regarding fundraising so our donors know what we're doing and so other nonprofits can copy our procedures. https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fundraising_2012 has more. Of course, we do have a multi-person paid fundraising staff, so not everything here is something GNOME can replicate. But we do use CiviCRM. Improving the gender diversity of our technical contributor base: We've joined the GNOME Outreach Program for Women! Giant thanks to Marina and all the past GOPW mentors and participants for proving that this works, and for leading the way. We also created a Friendly Space Policy for tech events: https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Friendly_space_policy (thanks to the Ada Initiative for the phrasing). GNOME is doing far better than the MediaWiki & other Wikimedia tech community at increasing the number and proportion of women contributing, and I believe OPW participation will help us catch up. It's promising so far. Product management and design: On a large scale, we collaboratively made a five-year plan via a strategic goal-setting & process -- see https://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Product_Whitepaper and https://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Strategic_Plan/Movement_Priorities#Goals for some idea of it. It did take a lot of time and work, but it has given us a strong basis for future collaboration. On the smaller scale of individual features, applications, etc: The Wikimedia Foundation has paid product managers who define the vision for each feature, but we don't have nearly enough of them. So, we're looking for volunteers to help with those kinds of tasks and activities -- see https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Product_development -- and had one of our OPW interns work on product management for our exported data: http://mitevam.tumblr.com/post/45917628265/goodbye-opw-wrap-up-post . Facilitating the integration of free software into academic courses: I got Wikimedia participating in UCOSP http://ucosp.ca , within which students developed a Wiktionary app for course credit -- https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/UCOSP_Spring_2012 . I haven't yet had the bandwidth to try to collaborate with Teaching Open Source http://teachingopensource.org/ and POSSE but perhaps we can in the future. I think the Wikipedia Education Program https://outreach.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_Education_Program is also a practice to take a look at. Keeping track of maintainers: We have an immediately-obsolete hand-maintained wiki table: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Developers/Maintainers that also includes a field for trainees who are working to become maintainers. Our community is chatting about whether switching to DOAP files would be a good choice, but it is on the "back burner." Systems administration and paying off technical debt: We decided to make the switch to Puppet for configuration management, which is taking a lot of time but is paying off well -- knowledge sharing is better and it's easier to replicate a setup to cloned boxes. More at https://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/02/01/from-duct-tape-to-puppets/ and https://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/02/05/how-the-technical-operations-team-stops-problems-in-their-tracks/ . It's been a very significant time investment for our sysadmins, most of whom are paid. Grantmaking and subsidizing volunteer expenses: Check out https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:Start for details on some of our current grantmaking. In general, instead of having one central Wikimedia travel committee to deal with travel expenses to Wikimedia events, Wikimedia organizations hosting events try to budget for individual scholarship processes. (This can lead to duplicated effort, unfortunately.) We do sometimes reimburse Wikimedians' participation in non-Wikimedia events if that will help move the Wikimedia mission forward -- see https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Participation:Support . And now some GNOME Love. I especially appreciate Paul Cutler, Will Thompson, Stormy Peters, Andreas Nilsson, Vincent Untz, Will Kahn-Greene, Allan Day, and other GNOME colleagues who encouraged me and edited my work. Also, thanks to Quim Gil and Andre Klapper, whom I met via GNOME and whom I was able to convince to join me on Wikimedia's Engineering Community Team. :-) And to Seif Lotfy, who gave me the chance to teach him a little, and to Karen Sandler, Máirín Duffy, and Marina Zhurakhinskaya for always being a step ahead on how to grow our community in sustainable ways. Hoping this is more helpful than spammy, Sumana Harihareswara https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Sharihareswara_%28WMF%29 _______________________________________________ foundation-list mailing list [email protected] https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
