Hopefully most of you are aware that over the last several months I have been working with the Tool Labs community to draft policies to help ensure that vital tools and bots can live on if their initial maintainers lose interest or are otherwise prevented from keeping their projects in good working order. I am very happy to announce that we now have two policies and a volunteer working committee to help enforce the policies.
The Tool Labs right to fork policy [0] helps to protect Wikimedia wikis from loss of a useful tool. It guarantees the right to fork an existing tool project by developers who are interested in extending and maintaining it after the original developers have lost interest. The Tool Labs Abandoned Tool policy [1] helps to protect Wikimedia wikis from loss of a useful tool. It defines processes for: * Requesting to be added as co-maintainer of a tool which has no active maintainers (adoption) * Requesting removal of inactive maintainers in a tool they have adopted (usurpation) The Tool Labs Standards Committee [2] is a group of Wikimedia volunteers who review, approve, and facilitate access requests for the source code of Tool Labs hosted tools, and adoption and usurpation of abandoned tools. Seven outstanding community members have been chosen to form the initial committee: * Eran Roz (User:Eranroz) * James Hare (User:Harej) * Huji Lee (User:Huji) * Amir Sarabadani (User:Ladsgroup) * Matanya (User:Matanya) * Nick Wilson (User:Quiddity) * zhuyifei1999 (User:Zhuyifei1999) There is a lot of work left to be done to establish the basic operating procedures used by the committee. I am looking forward working with the committee to help them get started. After some initial setup I expect them to become self-sufficient in carrying out the work of evaluating and processing requests from the community. Please join me both in thanking these individuals for accepting this responsibility and in helping them support all of us who create and use tools to make the wikis better. [0]: https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Help:Tool_Labs/Right_to_fork_policy [1]: https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Help:Tool_Labs/Abandoned_tool_policy [2]: https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Help:Tool_Labs/Tool_Labs_standards_committee Bryan -- Bryan Davis Wikimedia Foundation <[email protected]> [[m:User:BDavis_(WMF)]] Sr Software Engineer Boise, ID USA irc: bd808 v:415.839.6885 x6855 _______________________________________________ Labs-announce mailing list [email protected] https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/labs-announce _______________________________________________ Labs-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/labs-l
