[Wikimedia-l] Feedback survey about the Movement Strategy Forum

[Quim Gil]

Hello!

Everyone interested in Movement Strategy is invited to participate in the
first feedback survey about the Movement Strategy Forum. It doesn't matter
how involved you are in the Movement Strategy implementation or how much
you use the Forum, we want to make your opinion count.

You can find the full announcement with the link to the survey here:

* on the Forum -
https://forum.movement-strategy.org/t/survey-please-provide-your-feedback-about-the-movement-strategy-forum/2737

* on Meta -
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Movement_Strategy/Forum/Proposal#[Survey]_Please_provide_your_feedback_about_the_Movement_Strategy_Forum

You can also use these channels to ask your questions and share your
feedback about the survey itself. When the survey report is completed, we
will share it on this list as well.

Enjoy your weekend!

--
Quim Gil (he/him)
Director of Movement Strategy & Governance @ Wikimedia Foundation
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Qgil-WMF
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[Wikimedia-l] Re: Invitation to join the Movement Strategy Forum

[Quim Gil]

Alright, thank you for the additional feedback.

To wrap up this discussion, I'll list the homework we are taking from this
discussion. We will post our updates about this homework on the report talk
page on Meta
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Movement_Strategy/Forum/Community_Review_Report>
and its corresponding MS Forum topic
<https://forum.movement-strategy.org/t/ms-forum-community-review-report/1436>.
On Meta, everyone can enjoy the new section notifications (opt-in beta
feature), which are ideal for this kind of discussion. On the MS Forum, you
can also subscribe to specific topics if you wish.

We will...

* review the report summary to reflect better the content of that summary
in the first paragraphs
* propose a way to include Meta in the periodical surveys mentioned in the
report
* review the MS Forum goals and metrics to better define minimum
expectations on participation
* address any questions related to Wikimedia Space when the site is back
(in addition to Gergo's reply, see SJs related proposal
<https://forum.movement-strategy.org/t/migrating-threads-from-space/904>)

About missing more discussions directly linked to Movement Strategy vs
discussions about the forum itself or social/collateral topics, we miss
them too. :) Part of this is normal in a new online space that for many, is
a new community too. Part of this reflects a deeper problem related to the
state of the Movement Strategy process where the Forum is part of the
solution and not the problem. The Wikimedia Summit is around the corner.
This year it is all about Movement Strategy. It is a hybrid event, we
expect strategic discussions to start in the upcoming days, and we hope
this will help to focus, reactivate, and promote Movement Strategy
discussions in multiple venues.

Before ending this email I want to mention this apparent polarization
between Meta and the Forum. Our reality as a movement is way more complex,
even within the subset of Movement Strategy. For complementary reasons,
Meta and this Forum are very good venues to collaborate, document, and
agree on the next steps. Polarizing these spaces so that you are either
with "us" or "them" is not only pointless (who benefits from it?) but also
misses the years-old fact that there is plenty of Wikimedians using other
channels in (most of the time) disconnected or even invisible ways (despite
everyone's good intentions).

One example: the most strategic discussion during the community review was
the Minimum Criteria for Hubs Pilots. The discussions that went to the
deepest levels of multi-party discussion and nuance happened on... Meta?
The Forum? No, on the Hubs group on Telegram. There was also a SWAN call
with an interesting after-party. We took useful feedback from all the
channels we were able to watch.

Another example: this discussion here, off-wiki, on a mailing list that
lacks the basic features of Meta, the MS Forum, or social media. It also
lacks the diversity of representation, perspective and discourses that
these other channels (Meta included) can offer. And yet it retains enough
social privilege to be a go-to channel for certain discussions. We also
collect useful feedback here, keeping it into the perspective of our
movement.

We humans are complex and amazing, and the problems we want to solve in
Wikimedia are complex and amazing too. Let's recognize this and work
together for our common goals. This is what Movement Strategy is all about.

On Thu, Aug 18, 2022 at 6:00 PM Quim Gil  wrote:

> Hello everyone,
>
> The Movement Strategy Forum <https://forum.movement-strategy.org/> (MS
> Forum) is a multilingual collaborative space for all conversations about
> Movement Strategy implementation. We are inviting all Movement
> participants to collaborate on the MS Forum. The goal of the forum is to
> build community collaboration using an inclusive multilingual platform.
>
> The Movement Strategy
> <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:MyLanguage/Movement_Strategy> is
> a collaborative effort to imagine and build the future of the Wikimedia
> Movement. Anyone can contribute to the Movement Strategy, from a comment to
> a full-time project.
>
> Join this forum with your Wikimedia account, engage in conversations, and
> ask questions in your language.
>
> The Movement Strategy and Governance team (MSG) launched the proposal for
> this MS Forum in May. After a 2-month review period, we have just published
> the Community Review Report
> <https://forum.movement-strategy.org/t/ms-forum-community-review-report/1436>.
>  It
> includes a summary of the discussions, metrics, and information about the
> next steps.
>
> We look forward to seeing you at the MS Forum!
>
> Best regards,
>
> --
> Quim Gil (he/him)
> Director of Movement Strategy & Governance @ Wikimedia Foundation
> http

[Wikimedia-l] Re: Invitation to join the Movement Strategy Forum

[Quim Gil]

Hi,

On Sat, Aug 20, 2022 at 11:08 AM Galder Gonzalez Larrañaga <
galder...@hotmail.com> wrote:

> Hello,
> I agree with Mike's viewpoint: the report seems to be prewritten, and not
> based on actual discussions about the forum.
>

Please provide excerpts of the report that make you think this.


> Nevertheless, even if the summary was good, which is doubtful, the data
> presented in the discussion (
> https://forum.movement-strategy.org/t/ms-forum-community-review-report/1436/6)
> is confusing, and I would like to have a clarification. First of all, the
> axis isn't to scale, you are presenting three different monthly usages in
> percent but some of them are not adding 100%. I think I'm missing something
> in these graphs, because they should add up. Furthermore, presenting it as
> a percent makes the things confusing: there's actually more than 10x people
> participating in Meta, but the graph doesn't suggest this. The only world
> region where it seems to be more interactions via Forum than via Meta is in
> Sub-saharan Africa. But this is a percent, not a grand total. Around 12,5%
> of the Meta Users are from this region and around 22,5% of the Forum users.
> But 12,5% of the Meta users is 575 users, and 22,5% of MS forums is 33
> people. Is to say, there are more than 17 times more users from Sub-saharan
> Africa using Meta than MS Forums. The graph is misleading also in this
> point, not only in the percent not adding up.
>

It's obvious that the number of users is way higher for Meta than the
Forum. Having more users than Meta is not a goal of the Forum. We are
sharing the numbers there only to better understand the percentages shown.

The point of these metrics is to compare the regional location of Forum
users vs the regional location of Meta users. The hypothesis is that the MS
Forum can be especially useful for users outside of Northern & Western
Europe and North America.

The percentages show the distribution of users by region on Meta and on the
Forum. ~18% for the ESEAP blue line means that in that month ~18% of Meta
users were located in that region. The red line means the % of Forum users
in that month without counting Foundation staff. The yellow line includes
Foundation staff as well (as the number of Forum participants grows, the
influence of Foundation staff should become irrelevant, as in Meta).

This is the first time we produce these metrics. Comparing Meta with the MS
Forum is complex for many reasons. Meta covers way more than Movement
Strategy and discussions happen (with some exceptions) in the Talk
namespace. We could explore a smaller subset of Meta pages getting closer
to the MS Forum scope. Again, the goal being to check regional distribution
of users, not "Meta vs Forum". Still, we thought it was useful to start
recording this data and sharing it.

We will include these metrics in our monthly reports. Over time we will see
whether we can learn anything comparing the regional distribution of Meta
and Forum users.


> Then there are some interesting points about engagement. Is clearly going
> down. Is there any reflection on this? We don't have data on Meta
> engagement, so a comparison is difficult,
>

When a new space is announced, it is expected to receive a first bump of
activity. After that comes the actual curve of consolidation (or not) of
this new space. Two other factors influence in this case:

   - Many users responded to the community review call, joined, tested,
   maybe engaged a bit, and then left back to their routines, waiting for the
   outcome of the review period.
   - After mid June, Wikimedia activity enters a seasonal reduction of
   activity that can be especially felt in global conversations.

We will see how the trends look for August-October, after the review period
has ended and in the context of a more active season.

About Meta, there is this: Active editors on Meta in non content pages
.
One can see that May-July has lower numbers than January-April. Maybe a
seasonal effect? We will see in the upcoming months.

There is also All Time active editors in non content pages
,
and in all pages
.
It took a couple of years for the new platform to consolidate and start
growing month after month. Just to put things into perspective.



> but the data provided to defend that this forum is thriving is just saying
> the opposite.
>

That

[Wikimedia-l] Re: Invitation to join the Movement Strategy Forum

[Quim Gil]

Hi,

If anyone finds the report
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Movement_Strategy/Forum/Community_Review_Report>
biased, it would be helpful to share the excerpts or the absences that
prove this bias. We are happy to amend any mistakes, but for that we need
to identify them.

Also, it would be useful to know your perceived gravity of any bias you
detect. In other words, the report supports our decision to commit to the
long-term maintenance of the MS Forum. Based on your interpretation of the
community review, would you still support this decision or would you decide
something different (and what)? This helps knowing whether we are talking
about details or high impact perceived bias.

On Fri, Aug 19, 2022 at 7:57 PM Mike Peel  wrote:

> Hi,
>
> With respect, I think you have a big selection effect in your report. I
> guess you're getting most of your positive comments directly on your new
> forum, and you're matching them against your initial viewpoint, rather
> than being unbiased?
>
> If you look at comments on-wiki, they seem to be quite negative, e.g.,
> have a look through discussions at:
> https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Movement_Strategy/Forum/Proposal


We have included the feedback of this page in the report. We already
reflected it during the review period as we were publicly drafting the
summaries of each question, week after week. We even re-posted some of that
feedback in the corresponding forum discussion, to give forum users a
glimpse of the discussion on Meta (example
<https://forum.movement-strategy.org/t/do-you-think-this-forum-can-be-useful-to-welcome-and-retain-new-contributors-to-movement-strategy/51/7>
).

What feedback in that Talk page do you miss that is relevant and should
have been reflected?


> and:
>
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_(WMF)#new_resource_for_movement_discussions
> .
>

That discussion started after the community review ended but the feedback
follows the same lines as the page on Meta. Still, same question, what
ideas are missing in the report?

I strongly suggest running a Meta RfC about the existence of this forum,
> following standard community processes, and then decide on its future:
> https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Requests_for_comment


This is a forum to support the Movement Strategy implementation. The
community review was advertised in all Movement Strategy channels and
beyond. The feedback clearly reflects an overall preference to try the MS
Forum further rather than shutting it down. Users will decide about this
forum with their own feet (fingers), consolidating it as a community space
or not.

Given that this Forum is especially conceived to better support those who
can't or won't use Meta for discussions and collaboration, we don't think a
Meta RFC would be the right tool for this task.


>
>
> Thanks,
> Mike
>

-- 
Quim Gil (he/him)
Director of Movement Strategy & Governance @ Wikimedia Foundation
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Qgil-WMF
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[Wikimedia-l] Invitation to join the Movement Strategy Forum

[Quim Gil]

Hello everyone,

The Movement Strategy Forum <https://forum.movement-strategy.org/> (MS
Forum) is a multilingual collaborative space for all conversations about
Movement Strategy implementation. We are inviting all Movement participants
to collaborate on the MS Forum. The goal of the forum is to build community
collaboration using an inclusive multilingual platform.

The Movement Strategy
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:MyLanguage/Movement_Strategy> is a
collaborative effort to imagine and build the future of the Wikimedia
Movement. Anyone can contribute to the Movement Strategy, from a comment to
a full-time project.

Join this forum with your Wikimedia account, engage in conversations, and
ask questions in your language.

The Movement Strategy and Governance team (MSG) launched the proposal for
this MS Forum in May. After a 2-month review period, we have just published
the Community Review Report
<https://forum.movement-strategy.org/t/ms-forum-community-review-report/1436>.
It
includes a summary of the discussions, metrics, and information about the
next steps.

We look forward to seeing you at the MS Forum!

Best regards,

-- 
Quim Gil (he/him)
Director of Movement Strategy & Governance @ Wikimedia Foundation
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Qgil-WMF
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[Wikimedia-l] Re: Join the new Movement Strategy Forum community review

[Quim Gil]

he question into an idea connected to any of the
MS recommendations. But still for that it would be useful to share that
idea on Commons. This is what we did, and I think it is correct. The forum
doesn't aim to become a Q&A place for all things Wikimedia.


> Besides that, with my MCDC hat on, I hope after this trial period we'll
> get to see the data on how many people interacted about the Movement
> Strategy that we have not heard from in the previous 5 years through any of
> the other platforms that are in use to gather feedback. Already trying to
> watch several channels with Strategy discussions, I count on the MSG team
> to bring back these numbers and a summary of what is being discussed on the
> forum back to Meta. Even in a virtual world there is a limit on how many
> channels a Wikimedian can watch.
>

Yes, we plan to produce data about this community review period of two
months. We are already producing weekly reports
<https://forum.movement-strategy.org/t/forum-weekly-report/387> and we
welcome feedback about which data would be interesting to catch. There is
also a community review discussion about Goals
<https://forum.movement-strategy.org/t/what-goals-should-be-set-to-consider-this-forum-successful/52>
(that I will mention again when responding to Deskana).

Some thoughts about people we have not heard from before:

   - 3,5 weeks ago nobody had heard about this forum. We are doing targeted
   outreach step by step. Comparing participants between a 2-month community
   review period and 5 years of Movement Strategy discussions is useful, when
   put into perspective.
   - Even people falling in love with something need some time to adopt it.
   Among those who see something new as positive, many will wait to see how it
   goes before adopting it. 2 months is a good period to gather feedback. One
   year is a more reasonable period to assess adoption and impact.
   - People also need interesting topics to join, stick around and
   participate. We'll see how interesting is the MS agenda in these two
   months. The MCDC process looks promising as a project open to many
   conversations where diversity of participants and good coverage of multiple
   projects, languages and backgrounds is especially welcome.
   - Movement Strategy participation is in general lower than it was years
   ago. Seeing in the forum old participants coming back would be a success.
   - Among current and past participants, many don't share common places
   and, in practice, don't join common conversations except perhaps for the
   Global Conversations. Seeing known participants discussing together in a
   common space would also be a success.

About how many channels a Wikimedian can watch yes, this is absolutely
true. One interesting feature about the forum is that users can watch /
mute the categories, tags or topics that they care / not care about.
Another nice feature is that users get an automatic digest with popular
topics after not logging during 7 days (the periodicity can be changed).


> *NB: I see Sj's response crossed mine while I was writing, but let my
> example underline the issue of 'no unified notifications' and a possible
> problem with 'coherent archiving'. *
> *Please also be aware G-translate does not know all languages we have
> projects in, some of which are however supported by Yandex that is an
> option to choose for the Wikipedia article translation tool already.*
>

There is a discussion about supporting automatic translation of languages
not supported by Google
<https://forum.movement-strategy.org/t/supporting-automatic-translations-of-languages-existing-on-wiki-but-not-supported-by-google-translate/281>.
If anyone finds more languages that should be covered, please let us know.
Currently the plugin only accepts on engine at a time. If it is agreed that
this is an important feature, then we can check what would it take to
improve the plugin to accept more engines.

Sorry, this email is already too long. I'll review the rest of the thread
and reply another day.

-- 
Quim Gil (he/him)
Director of Movement Strategy & Governance @ Wikimedia Foundation
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Qgil-WMF
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[Wikimedia-l] Re: Join the new Movement Strategy Forum community review

[Quim Gil]

Hi, thank you for this conversation. It is especially important to hear
more opinions from more people. If you are willing but still hesitating to
add your perspective, please go ahead and comment here or in the channel
you prefer.

I will comment on the forum related points later today, but in the meantime
I just wanted to say ..

On Tue, Jun 14, 2022, 6:42 AM Risker  wrote:

> Just to change the subject for a short minute:
>

This thread about the forum is dense enough already. Given that this is a
mailing list, please consider "changing the subject" indeed 🙂 and
discussing the elections in a separate thread.



> This is a Board of Trustees election.  It is supposed to be managed by the 
> Elections
> Committee
> ,
> a Board-appointed committee of community members.  Their mandate was
> reviewed and updated within the past month by Board resolution. (Yes, I
> know this used to be the "affiliate-selected" round, but now that it is an
> election, things have changed.)
>
> Is there a reason why every single communication I have seen about this
> election has been authored by staff members, none of whom are listed as
> staff support for the committee?  Did the Elections Committee carry out a
> consultation with the community to make this significant change in the
> manner in which candidate questions will be handled, as is indicated by
> their charter?
>
> There's a reason why these elections have never been managed by WMF staff
> - I think anyone could see the conflict of interest if they were to do so -
> and the Elections Committee or a committee selected by affiliates has
> handled these matters to date.  I'd like to know why this does not seem to
> be the case in this election.
>
> You may now wish to return to your previous discussions about where to
> talk about this election.  Please excuse my interruption.  /s
>
> Risker/Anne
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[Wikimedia-l] Re: Join the new Movement Strategy Forum community review

[Quim Gil]

Hi Mike,

Yes, on-wiki replies are fine and the organizers of the election will
contact you to clarify the details.

We will find a fix to the problem of the content license on the forum.
Thank you for pointing this out.

About features, this is what the election organizers want to try out:

* Let affiliates propose and select their questions by themselves. This is
why we are providing a private space for affiliate representatives to
propose questions and vote for them.

* Give all candidates three days to writel their replies before they can be
read by anyone. This allows all candidates to organize their time to
respond, not taxing as much those who have less free time or less flexible
schedules. This is why we give access to candidates to this private space
at the same time, when the questions are ready, and then make this space
public at the date announced.

* Give everyone more time to read the candidates' answers in their
preferred languages, using automatic translation. We want to reduce the gap
that non-English speakers have to endure when texts are only available in
English, and when translations take extra days to arrive, if they arrive
for their language at all. This is another reason to use the forum.


On Sat, Jun 11, 2022, 11:09 PM Mike Peel  wrote:

> On 11/6/22 05:10:51, Quim Gil wrote:
> > For context, the same email gives an option to candidates to answer the
> > questions via email. In this case, the election organizers will post the
> > answers in the forum on their behalf.
>
> Answering by email isn't a great solution. I'm hoping to be able to
> reply on-wiki, which is the normal way of answering questions during
> Wikimedia elections. However, since the forum doesn't seem to specify
> copyright, I don't think CC-BY-SA responses on-wiki can be shared on the
> forum.
>
> > This is the only point of the election process where this forum is being
> > used. It allows affiliates to propose and prioritize their questions
> > quickly, and it allows to open the candidate replies to the public at
> > the same time, automatically translated to the preference to each
> > reader. Candidates can reply via email if they prefer. If a candidate
> > doesn't want to use the forum, they don't have to.
>
> It's good to hear that it won't be used more than that. It shouldn't
> even be used for this, though.
>
> > More context. This election process also includes an option for voters
> > to use a voting advice tool that is off-wiki as well. This tool was used
> > in the last MCDC election and received wide support and positive
> > feedback. None of the candidates had any objections, and there were +70.
> > Here too the candidates don't have to use this tool directly if they
> > don't want to.
>
> So because no-one objected before, my objections are clearly unreasonable?
>
> > These specialized tools are easy to use and they provide a benefit to
> > users that right now we cannot replicate with wiki pages alone.
>
> There is nothing on these forums that can't be replicated on-wiki, as
> has been thoroughly demonstrated in this thread.
>
> This is Wikimedia. Please keep things on-wiki.
>
> Thanks,
> Mike
>
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[Wikimedia-l] Re: Join the new Movement Strategy Forum community review

[Quim Gil]

On Sat, Jun 11, 2022, 2:33 AM Mike Peel  wrote:

> So I just received this:
>
>  > Thank you all again for submitting your candidatures for the Wikimedia
>  > Foundation Board of Trustees. The Board Selection Task Force and the
>  > Elections Committee are excited to inform you about the first community
>  > engagement opportunity of this 2022 Board election process.
>  >
>  >
>  > The Affiliate Representatives will be submitting questions for
>  > candidates to answer. The process will use the new Movement Strategy
>  > Forum <https://forum.movement-strategy.org/>, based on the open-source
>  > platform Discourse <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discourse_(software)
> >.
>  > The great thing about Discourse is replies can be automatically
>  > translated by users into their preferred languages. We will send you
>  > each an email invitation to join a private category once the time to
>  > answer questions begins (June 18). Each candidate will use their
>  > Wikimedia account to log in, there is no need to create a new account
>  > and password.
>

For context, the same email gives an option to candidates to answer the
questions via email. In this case, the election organizers will post the
answers in the forum on their behalf.


> So by opposing this off-wiki forum, I've probably excluded myself from
> going any further in this election.
>

This is the only point of the election process where this forum is being
used. It allows affiliates to propose and prioritize their questions
quickly, and it allows to open the candidate replies to the public at the
same time, automatically translated to the preference to each reader.
Candidates can reply via email if they prefer. If a candidate doesn't want
to use the forum, they don't have to.

More context. This election process also includes an option for voters to
use a voting advice tool that is off-wiki as well. This tool was used in
the last MCDC election and received wide support and positive feedback.
None of the candidates had any objections, and there were +70. Here too the
candidates don't have to use this tool directly if they don't want to.

These specialized tools are easy to use and they provide a benefit to users
that right now we cannot replicate with wiki pages alone.


> Thanks,
> Mike
>
> On 31/5/22 23:35:52, Mike Peel wrote:
> >
> >  > There is no on-site privacy policy, it just links to
> >  > wikimediafoundation.org <http://wikimediafoundation.org>?
> >  >
> >  > See this pinned topic:
> >  >
> >  > User privacy considerations in this forum
> >  >
> >
> https://forum.movement-strategy.org/t/user-privacy-considerations-in-this-forum/55
> > <
> https://forum.movement-strategy.org/t/user-privacy-considerations-in-this-forum/55>
>
> >
> >
> > So this does not follow the WMF's privacy policy at:
> > https://foundation.wikimedia.org/wiki/Privacy_policy
> >
> > You didn't answer this.
> >
> > On 31/5/22 23:25:04, Quim Gil wrote:
> >>
> >>
> >> On Wed, Jun 1, 2022 at 12:17 AM Mike Peel  >> <mailto:em...@mikepeel.net>> wrote:
> >>
> >> This is not a community review - this is an off-wiki discussion.
> >>
> >>
> >> Participation is also welcome here:
> >> https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Movement_Strategy/Forum/Proposal
> >> <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Movement_Strategy/Forum/Proposal>
> >
> > Every single link under "Community review questions" goes to your new
> > website. You state that "The Movement Strategy Forum is based on
> > Discourse, a powerful open-source platform for community discussions." .
> > I thought that's what MediaWiki was?
> >
> >>
> >>  > It's a Discourse instance. https://discourse.org
> >> <https://discourse.org> <https://discourse.org
> >> <https://discourse.org>>
> >>  > is an open-source platform specializing in community
> >> conversations.
> >> That's $100/month for a standard subscription. per
> >> https://www.discourse.org/pricing
> >> <https://www.discourse.org/pricing>.
> >>
> >>
> >> This is for those who want to have their site hosted by the Discourse
> >> maintainers, which is an option we have taken for now. Discourse is
> >> free software.
> >
> > So WMF is paying Discourse to hold community discussions that would
> > normally be held on MediaWiki? Huh?
> >
> > Thanks,
> > Mike
> _

[Wikimedia-l] Re: Join the new Movement Strategy Forum community review

[Quim Gil]

Hi again,

The proposal for a new forum comes with a problem statement
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Movement_Strategy/Forum/Proposal#Why_a_Movement_Strategy_Forum>,
a list of main features aimed to address this problem, and a set of
questions to help everyone find points of tangible discussion and hopefully
agreement.

Today, "use a wiki" or "we have Meta" alone doesn't solve the problem. The
discrimination suffered by volunteers not fluent in English is real. The
intimidation and alienation felt by many volunteers and many groups that
are underrepresented in our movement or marginalized in our societies is
real. And simply, the difficulty to have multiple simultaneous complex
discussions in a structured and enjoyable way is very real.

We are not claiming that this forum can solve all these problems in one
strike. However, we firmly believe that this forum presents a better
alternative here and now for everyone interested in the Movement Strategy
implementation. Clearly a better alternative for those who are in practice
excluded or gone from traditional on-wiki conversations. But also to
everyone else (expert wiki editors included) who wants to get things done
in a context where diversity, equity, inclusion, efficient use of time, and
fun are naturally expected.

Many people have responded to this problem with their feet. Wikimedia
cross-project connections and conversations have been trending towards
"social media" platforms for years. Today they are all scattered and still
growing. And well, many years before social media, mailing lists like this
one were created "off-wiki" for a reason.

This forum proposes the creation of a platform fully functional today, to
host the conversations and collaboration needed to implement the Movement
Strategy. We can offer a platform as easy to use as the popular tools
people are using daily to connect and discuss. We can offer features none
of these commercial platforms offer today like automatic translation,
better organization of complex conversations, better search and memory, and
a much better alignment with the Wikimedia values. All this is available
today, one Wikimedia login click away. For you to review.

Keeping Meta updated including possibilities for participation is perfectly
possible. One of the questions
<https://forum.movement-strategy.org/t/are-there-other-channels-that-you-would-prefer-to-use-in-addition-to-or-instead-of-this-forum-for-movement-strategy-updates-and-feedback-why/54>
of the community review asks about how the support of other channels would
work in practice. If you appreciate Meta-Wiki as much as, say, Wikimedia
volunteers who don't speak English, please contribute your ideas to find
the best solutions.

I hope this expresses our general motivation to get out of everyone's
comfort zone (ours included) and propose this forum.

Florence asks:
> Will there be any notion of Single Login in the future (when/if it starts
being hosted by WMF) ?

Wikimedia login is in effect already now, and it's the only way to log in
to the forum. After logging in the first time, the browser keeps the
session for a period of time (that can be configured by the admins) so that
people don't have to log in again every day.

On Wed, Jun 1, 2022 at 12:36 AM Mike Peel  wrote:

>
>  > See this pinned topic:
>  >
>  > User privacy considerations in this forum
>  >
>
> https://forum.movement-strategy.org/t/user-privacy-considerations-in-this-forum/55
> <
> https://forum.movement-strategy.org/t/user-privacy-considerations-in-this-forum/55
> >
>
> So this does not follow the WMF's privacy policy at:
> https://foundation.wikimedia.org/wiki/Privacy_policy
>
> You didn't answer this.
>

Sorry, I had responded with a link. This is what the link says:

> We are still working on the Privacy Policy and the Terms of Use of the
Movement Strategy Forum.
> They will be completed during the community review. In the meantime, we
provide here information
> about privacy for users of this platform.


> Every single link under "Community review questions" goes to your new
> website.


We are asking volunteers to review a proposed new forum. We have a forum
that people can use to inform their reviews. Sending people to the forum
being reviewed is only logical.

All wiki pages have a talk page, and the proposal's talk page <http://We
are still working on the Privacy Policy and the Terms of Use of the
Movement Strategy Forum. They will be completed during the community
review. In the meantime, we provide here information about privacy for
users of this platform.> also welcomes people to contribute their feedback
there too, providing a structure to comment on the same questions.

-- 
Quim Gil (he/him)
Director of Movement Strategy & Governance @ Wikimedia Foundation
https://meta.wikimed

[Wikimedia-l] Re: Join the new Movement Strategy Forum community review

[Quim Gil]

On Wed, Jun 1, 2022 at 12:17 AM Mike Peel  wrote:

> This is not a community review - this is an off-wiki discussion.
>

Participation is also welcome here:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Movement_Strategy/Forum/Proposal


> It's a Discourse instance. https://discourse.org <https://discourse.org>
> > is an open-source platform specializing in community conversations.
> That's $100/month for a standard subscription. per
> https://www.discourse.org/pricing.
>

This is for those who want to have their site hosted by the Discourse
maintainers, which is an option we have taken for now. Discourse is free
software.

https://github.com/discourse/discourse
https://github.com/discourse/discourse/blob/main/LICENSE.txt

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[Wikimedia-l] Re: Join the new Movement Strategy Forum community review

[Quim Gil]

Hi Mike,

On Tue, May 31, 2022 at 11:55 PM Mike Peel  wrote:

> Hi,
>
> Is this a legitimate WMF website?


It is a pre-launch site going through a community review and maintained by
the Movement Strategy and Governance team at the Wikimedia Foundation.


> Trying to trace where this website is
> being hosted doesn't go very far - the domain seems have its DNS at
> gandi.net, with the registration via pir.org, and its contact info is at
> afilias.info? Compare to wikimedia.org that at least says "Registrant
> Organization: Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.".



Yes, this is being discussed at one of the questions of the community
review:

What do you think about the proposed name and domain?
https://forum.movement-strategy.org/t/what-do-you-think-about-the-proposed-name-and-domain/53


> There is no on-site privacy policy, it just links to
> wikimediafoundation.org?


See this pinned topic:

User privacy considerations in this forum
https://forum.movement-strategy.org/t/user-privacy-considerations-in-this-forum/55


> It's also very much not a mediawiki installation?
>

It's a Discourse instance. https://discourse.org is an open-source platform
specializing in community conversations.


>
> Thanks,
> Mike
>
> On 31/5/22 22:38:11, Quim Gil wrote:
> > Hello everyone,
> >
> > This is an invitation to all Movement Strategy participants and
> > Wikimedians in general to try out a new platform for truly multilingual
> > collaboration:
> >
> > Movement Strategy Forum - https://forum.movement-strategy.org/
> > <https://forum.movement-strategy.org/>
> >
> > We have started a community review
> > <
> https://forum.movement-strategy.org/t/movement-strategy-forum-community-review/46>
>
> > period of two months. If the community feedback is positive, the Forum
> > will launch in August 2022 before Wikimania. If not, we will follow the
> > feedback received, changing the proposal or closing it.
> >
> > We opened the Forum on May 24 with targeted outreach, hoping that the
> > new site features would work. 😅 A week later, the Wikimedia login has
> > been used by +200 users, the automatic translation is allowing speakers
> > of different languages to discuss together, and we are ready to welcome
> > more reviewers, testers, and other curious minds.
> >
> > We have just released the first weekly report
> > <https://forum.movement-strategy.org/t/forum-weekly-report/387>. Looking
>
> > forward to reading your first impressions in the next one!
> >
> > --
> > Quim Gil (he/him)
> > Director of Movement Strategy & Governance @ Wikimedia Foundation
> > https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Qgil-WMF
> > <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Qgil-WMF>
> >
> > ___
> > Wikimedia-l mailing list -- wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org, guidelines
> at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and
> https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l
> > Public archives at
> https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org/message/H5V56Z2TIYEO5TX6UAJHQJDXPUK4CCYS/
> > To unsubscribe send an email to wikimedia-l-le...@lists.wikimedia.org
>


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[Wikimedia-l] Join the new Movement Strategy Forum community review

[Quim Gil]

Hello everyone,

This is an invitation to all Movement Strategy participants and Wikimedians
in general to try out a new platform for truly multilingual collaboration:

Movement Strategy Forum - https://forum.movement-strategy.org/

We have started a community review
<https://forum.movement-strategy.org/t/movement-strategy-forum-community-review/46>
period of two months. If the community feedback is positive, the Forum will
launch in August 2022 before Wikimania. If not, we will follow the feedback
received, changing the proposal or closing it.

We opened the Forum on May 24 with targeted outreach, hoping that the new
site features would work. 😅 A week later, the Wikimedia login has been
used by +200 users, the automatic translation is allowing speakers of
different languages to discuss together, and we are ready to welcome more
reviewers, testers, and other curious minds.

We have just released the first weekly report
<https://forum.movement-strategy.org/t/forum-weekly-report/387>. Looking
forward to reading your first impressions in the next one!

-- 
Quim Gil (he/him)
Director of Movement Strategy & Governance @ Wikimedia Foundation
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Qgil-WMF
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[Wikimedia-l] Board election postponed until August 18th

[Quim Gil]

Hello, all.

(You can read this announcement in other languages on
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_elections/2021/2021-08-02/Delay_of_the_2021_Board_of_Trustees_election
)

We are reaching out to you today regarding the 2021 Wikimedia Foundation
Board of Trustees election
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_elections/2021>. This
election was due to open on August 4th. Due to some technical issues with
SecurePoll, the election must be delayed by two weeks. This means we plan
to launch the election on August 18th, which is the day after Wikimania
concludes.


For information on the technical issues, you can see the Phabricator ticket
<https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T287859>.

We are truly sorry for this delay and hope that we will get back on
schedule on August 18th. We are in touch with the Elections Committee and
the candidates to coordinate next steps. We will update the Board election
Talk page
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Wikimedia_Foundation_elections/2021>
and Telegram channel <https://t.me/wmboardgovernancechat> as we know more.
We are translating this announcement on Meta
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_elections/2021/2021-08-02/Delay_of_the_2021_Board_of_Trustees_election>
and we are starting the mass distribution of the news as we speak.

-- 
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https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Qgil-WMF
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[Wikimedia-l] Re: Convergence of proposals to create Movement Charter drafting committee - was Re: Re: "Expression of interest" Movement Charter Drafting Committee

[Quim Gil]

Hi, also related to the convergence of proposals related to the Movement
Charter drafting committee...

A lot was discussed about the Movement Charter drafting committee last
week, and the Movement Strategy team is completing the report.

The proposal the Foundation shared received some good feedback, some mixed
and yet curious feedback, and also some criticism. We are introducing some
changes to this proposal to address the main concerns: the timeline and the
possibility to vote.

Please review this proposed modification. We hope that we all can find a
point of compromise and a way forward.

https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Movement_Strategy/Events/Movement_Charter_Global_Conversation,_26-27_June_2021/Proposal_by_the_Wikimedia_Foundation#Modification_of_our_proposal_after_the_June_27_conversations

On Sun, Jun 27, 2021 at 10:34 PM Ad Huikeshoven 
wrote:

> Dear all,
>
> Today's Global Conversations were about the composition, the selection,
> and compensation of members for a Movement Charter Drafting Committee.
> To move forward, convergence of opinions on the different proposals is
> necessary. So far there are four proposals:
> 1. A proposal by Pharos (the 7/7/7 proposal):
> https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Movement_Charter/Committee
> 2. A proposal by Movement Strategy veterans:
> https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Strategy/Wikimedia_movement/2018-20/Transition/Proposal:_Drafting_a_Movement_Charter
> 3. A proposal by WMF:
> https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Movement_Strategy/Events/Movement_Charter_Global_Conversation,_26-27_June_2021/Proposal_by_the_Wikimedia_Foundation
> 4. A proposal by Nosebagbear:
> https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Movement_Charter_Drafting_Committee_proposal
>
> Which proposal do you favor? Please record your preferences on meta, to
> help move this process forward
>
> Regards,
>
> Ad Huikeshoven
>
> P.S. I owed Winnie a reply, which you can read below.
>
> On Sun, Jun 20, 2021 at 3:57 PM Winnie kabintie  wrote:
>
>> Dear Ad,
>>
>> Could you please clarify the following;
>>
>> Based on your email, does it mean that only candidates who express
>> interest in being part of the drafting committee before the 2nd round of
>> global conversations will be up for scrutiny? What about those that will be
>> fronted by affiliates and WMF?
>>
>
> Hi Winnie: The answer to the first question is no - I called for an
> expression of interest - to learn if there are potentially more candidates
> than seats, I did not call for candidates. The answer the second question:
> the affiliates and WMF will come up, or front candidates when asked and
> needed. The WMF did an interesting proposal, to which you don't have
> objections, see
> https://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:Movement_Strategy/Events/Movement_Charter_Global_Conversation,_26-27_June_2021/Proposal_by_the_Wikimedia_Foundation&diff=next&oldid=21640239&diffmode=source
> .
> ___
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[Wikimedia-l] First round of Movement Strategy Implementation Grants

[Quim Gil]

The first call for Movement Strategy Implementation Grants is open. These
grants can support short-term planning activities with a budget of up to
$2,000 USD.

*Apply by the end of June 15
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:Project/Rapid/Apply#Movement_Strategy_implementation>*!
We look forward to reading your applications. We are available for any
follow-up questions or clarifications via strategy2030[image: (_AT_)]
wikimedia.org.

-- 
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[Wikimedia-l] Pre-announcing Movement Strategy Implementation Grants

[Quim Gil]

Hi, here is the DRAFT call for Movement Strategy Implementation Grants. We
have published this draft to start the translation work. Also to allow
anyone interested to start preparing their applications and ask any
questions.

https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_2030/2021_Call_for_Movement_Strategy_Implementation_Grants

Watch that page! We will update it as soon as we are ready to start
receiving applications. We will let you know on this channel as well.

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[Wikimedia-l] Movement Strategy support in the next 10 weeks

[Quim Gil]

Hello everyone, the Movement Strategy team has some news for you:

Movement Strategy support in the next 10 weeks
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Strategy/Wikimedia_movement/2018-20/Transition/Update_14-04-2021

It's implementation time!

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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Moderation notice

[Quim Gil]

Hi,

On Fri, Sep 11, 2020 at 4:08 AM effe iets anders 
wrote:

> I would love us to be more gentle, but at the same time it is also
> important to recognize diversity in character, expression and opinion.


Well, precisely?  :)

"To recognize diversity in character, expression and opinion" is crucial.
Recognizing privilege is just as important.

There is abundant evidence about strong and disrespectful language driving
away those who actually would contribute diversity in a conversation. For
one (usually privileged) participant that goes through moderation after
ignoring warnings, how many (usually less or no privileged) disengage and
leave silently to avoid or boycott disrespectful behavior? That is where
the big loss in diversity lies.

One good reason to really care about high standards of respect and civility
is precisely to increase the diversity of our movement. Most of our "open"
discussion channels are not open at all. Full participation in these
channels is in practice quite exclusive. Those who thrive are privileged
persons who can handle an aggressive communication style or even enjoy it.
Wikimedia-l is no exception, and the UCoC thread is a typical example.

More and more contributors are taking action to change this trend, and this
is one of the best things happening right now in our movement.

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Re: [Wikimedia-l] A Universal Code of Conduct draft for review

[Quim Gil]

On Fri, Sep 11, 2020 at 9:31 AM Benjamin Ikuta 
wrote:

>
>
> Please, enlighten me.
>

Here is an alternative suggestion. Check the UCoC draft and see whether you
see room for improvement or disagree with anything specific in it. This is
a productive way to compare your personal understanding of civility against
the understanding of civility the UCoC offers for the entire movement. If
you have ideas to improve the draft, share them, if possible on the Meta
page where the main discussion is happening.

https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Universal_Code_of_Conduct/Draft_review


>
>
>
> On Sep 10, 2020, at 11:39 PM, Ziko van Dijk  wrote:
>
> > Am Fr., 11. Sept. 2020 um 08:07 Uhr schrieb Benjamin Ikuta
> > :
> >>
> >> Is there some context that makes this much worse than it seems, or do I
> have a deeply flawed understanding of civility?
> >
> > Well, are you open to consider the possibility that the latter might
> > theoretically be the case, at least partially?
> > Kind regards
> > Ziko


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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Introducing Diff – a blog by and for the Wikimedia volunteer community

[Quim Gil]

Hi,

On Fri, Jul 17, 2020 at 12:54 PM Andy Mabbett 
wrote:

> > > > > What consultation was carried out with contributors, and the
> > > > > wider the Wikimedia community, to inform this change?
>
> Although you quoted it, you seem to have overlooked this question.


I aimed to address this question with this answer:

> When we announced Next steps for Wikimedia Space [1] we said that the
Space blog
> would continue in a new home, and this is exactly what we have done.
(...)
> [1] https://discuss-space.wmflabs.org/t/next-steps-on-wikimedia-space/3184

This is when we informed about this plan (February 18), also on this list.
The feedback we received was about the Wikimedia Space announcement in
general and there was some discussion about the Discuss part, but nothing
in a way or another about the blog. We didn't consult any further, and we
focused on proceeding with the migration.

Offering the previous blog archives as part of the new blog is logical. The
Space Blog aimed to be a continuation of the Wikimedia Blog, but it was a
prototype. Diff aims to be a continuation of the Wikimedia Blog and the
Space blog, and it is a project officially supported, in production
servers. Hence the consolidation of community news archives.

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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Introducing Diff – a blog by and for the Wikimedia volunteer community

[Quim Gil]

dia.org/2017/11/29/astronaut-spoken-voice/
> > >
> > > an independently-archived copy may be found at:
> > >
> > >
> > >
> >
> https://web.archive.org/web/*/https://blog.wikimedia.org/2017/11/29/astronaut-spoken-voice/
> > >
> > > This has now been republished at:
> > >
> > >https://diff.wikimedia.org/2017/11/29/astronaut-spoken-voice/
> > >
> > > to which the original URL has now been redirected.
> > >
> > >
> > > The new version of the article has  footer, saying:
> > >
> > >Archive notice: This is an archived post from blog.wikimedia.org,
> and
> > >as such was written under a different editorial standard than Diff.
> > >
> > > I am concerned that this unexplained comment may not reflect well on
> > > me, as the named author.
> > >
> > >
> > > The new version of my author profile page:
> > >
> > >https://diff.wikimedia.org/author/cap-andy-mabbet/
> > >
> > > is missing the thumbnail image for the blog post; compare with the
> > > archived version:
> > >
> > >
> > >
> >
> https://web.archive.org/web/20191218122440/https://blog.wikimedia.org/author/andy-mabbet/
> > >
> > > (the spelling error in the URL has carried over from the original).
> > >
> > > > The channel
> > > > is primarily intended for community-authored posts, in which
> > > > volunteers can share their stories, learnings, and ideas with each
> > > > other.
> > >
> > > I didn't write the above post simply to share the story with other
> > > volunteers; it was written - I again emphasise, at the WMF's request -
> > >  for a global audience, and presented to the press as such, as part of
> > > a joint publicity initiative with the European Space Agency.
> > >
> > > > content on Diff can be written and
> > > > translated into languages to reach a wide audience.
> > >
> > > My original post - as can be seen from the banner in the version at
> > > the Internet Archive - was kindly translated into Italian (apt, as the
> > > subject was an Italian Astronaut) and French. The banner containing
> > > the links to those translations is missing from the "Diff" copy.
> > >
> > > The original URLs of the italian and French versions:
> > >
> > >
> > >
> >
> https://blog.wikimedia.org/it/2017/11/29/wikipedia-lascia-il-pianeta-terra
> > >
> > >
> > >
> >
> https://blog.wikimedia.org/fr/2017/12/01/wikipedia-quitte-la-planete-terre
> > >
> > > now redirect, respectively, to:
> > >
> > >
> > >
> >
> https://diff.wikimedia.org/it/2017/11/29/wikipedia-lascia-il-pianeta-terra
> > >
> > >
> > >
> >
> https://diff.wikimedia.org/fr/2017/12/01/wikipedia-quitte-la-planete-terre
> > >
> > > each of which are returning a 404 error.
> > >
> > > Several links to the original Italian URL, from the Italian-language
> > > Wikipedia, including those in encyclopedia articles, and two links to
> > > the original French URL on the French-language Wikipedia, are now
> > > broken. Obviously this also applies to any external sites that link to
> > > them, too.
> > >
> > > > Still curious to learn more?
> > >
> > > Yes: What consultation was carried out with contributors, and the
> > > wider the Wikimedia community, to inform this change?
> > >
> > > --
> > > Andy Mabbett
> > > @pigsonthewing
> > > http://pigsonthewing.org.uk
> > >
> > > ___
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Brand Project: Who are we as a movement?

[Quim Gil]

Hi Tito,

On Thu, Jun 25, 2020 at 11:01 PM Tito Dutta  wrote:

> Greetings,
> There was a continuous practice of citing/overciting the FAQ page,
> sometimes without answering the questions directly. This happened more on
> the other mailing lists (For example:
>
> https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimediaindia-l/2020-April/014589.html
> )
>
> Now, the /FAQ page, which was being continuously referred to, has a
> "neutrality of this page is disputed" tag
>
> https://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Communications/Wikimedia_brands/2030_movement_brand_project/FAQ&oldid=20200949
> .
> It earlier had an essay tag. I have read its talk page.
>
> Until things are settled, which page is recommended (if there is any)?
>
> (Not to anyone in specific, a question/thought in general)
>

As the person who published that notice...

I think the FAQ is an ok place to find answers to questions. The Neutrality
notice was a short term solution to improve previous versions of notices
placed there. If anyone wonders about why these notices, you can find
several related discussions in the Talk page, and the edit history is also
quite telling. That page has been a tense corner for months.

Beyond the specific scope of the Brand project, a point of contention has
been and continues to be more Meta: whether a project team (of any kind,
not just a Foundation team) can explain a project in their terms (including
FAQs) or anyone can edit any page in Meta (including modifying, deleting or
reverting answers from the project team in the project FAQ). The topic is
more nuanced and complex than this, I bet all parties are quite frustrated
by now, and this is probably a good meta conversation to have in Meta at
some point, detached from specific projects and heated discussions.

Back to this FAQ, this week the team has prepared updates to that page.
Tito, you asking here is an extra motivation to proceed.  :)  If anyone
wants to help, watching the page and providing alternative views if new
discussions arise is a good way to contribute to the improvement of the FAQ
and hopefully the removal of that notice soon.

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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Next steps on Wikimedia Space

[Quim Gil]

Thank you for all the feedback. After scanning different channels, we have
a wide range of opinions which reflect how deep and complex the problem of
cross-wiki collaboration is, and also how differently the Space prototype
and this decision is being perceived. We will process this feedback and
integrate it in the lessons learned. If you have more feedback or
questions, please share. This conversation is important.

The channels we are watching:

* https://discuss-space.wmflabs.org/t/next-steps-on-wikimedia-space/3184
*
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Wikimedia_Space#Next_steps_on_Wikimedia_Space
*
https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimedia-l/2020-February/094269.html
and replies
*
https://www.facebook.com/groups/wikipediaweekly/permalink/2699004306814050/

If you are aware of more conversations related to this announcement, please
share them here as well.

On Tue, Feb 18, 2020 at 11:30 AM Quim Gil  wrote:

> Last year, the Wikimedia Foundation launched Wikimedia Space to experiment
> with new ways to connect volunteers, increase movement participation, and
> showcase community stories. While we remain committed to this important
> goal, based on lessons learned through the Space prototype, the Foundation
> has decided to close Discuss Space. The Space blog, which continues to fill
> a need to share news for the movement by the movement, will continue in a
> new home. Please continue to submit community-focused stories [1], so that
> we may share them with the movement.
>
> To learn more about the next steps, check the full announcement at
> https://space.wmflabs.org/2020/02/18/next-steps-on-wikimedia-space/
>
> We have learned a lot from this initiative and want to thank all Space
> users [2] for their time and contributions. We also invite everyone
> interested in documenting lessons learned and discussing next steps to join
> us in taking this effort even further, either at the About Wikimedia Space
> category in Discuss [3] or the Space talk page in Meta [4].
>
> [1]
> https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Space/Editorial_guidelines#How_to_get_started
> [2] https://discuss-space.wmflabs.org/u?period=all
> [3] https://discuss-space.wmflabs.org/c/about-wikimedia-space/2
> [4] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Wikimedia_Space
>
> --
> Quim Gil (he/him)
> Senior Manager of Community Relations @ Wikimedia Foundation
> https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Qgil-WMF
>


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[Wikimedia-l] Next steps on Wikimedia Space

[Quim Gil]

Last year, the Wikimedia Foundation launched Wikimedia Space to experiment
with new ways to connect volunteers, increase movement participation, and
showcase community stories. While we remain committed to this important
goal, based on lessons learned through the Space prototype, the Foundation
has decided to close Discuss Space. The Space blog, which continues to fill
a need to share news for the movement by the movement, will continue in a
new home. Please continue to submit community-focused stories [1], so that
we may share them with the movement.

To learn more about the next steps, check the full announcement at
https://space.wmflabs.org/2020/02/18/next-steps-on-wikimedia-space/

We have learned a lot from this initiative and want to thank all Space
users [2] for their time and contributions. We also invite everyone
interested in documenting lessons learned and discussing next steps to join
us in taking this effort even further, either at the About Wikimedia Space
category in Discuss [3] or the Space talk page in Meta [4].

[1]
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Space/Editorial_guidelines#How_to_get_started
[2] https://discuss-space.wmflabs.org/u?period=all
[3] https://discuss-space.wmflabs.org/c/about-wikimedia-space/2
[4] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Wikimedia_Space

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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Introducing Wikimedia Space: A space for movement news and conversations

[Quim Gil]

Hi, thank you for your feedback about Wikimedia Space.

So far, there have been many comments focusing on _who_ has released _what_
and _how_. Let me tell you _why_ we are proposing Wikimedia Space. People
agreeing on _why_ can agree on the rest way easier.

Wikimedia Space is all about Wikimedia growth. If you are supporting
newcomers or you are contributing to the growth of the Wikimedia movement
in other ways, we are very interested in your opinions, your suggestions,
your needs. And we are especially interested in hearing from you if you are
a promoter of movement diversity and/or part of any kind of group
underrepresented in Wikimedia.

Why Wikimedia Space, in more detail:

From the Wikimedia movement strategic direction -
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Strategy/Wikimedia_movement/2018-20

* Knowledge equity


From the Wikimedia Foundation medium-term plan -
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Medium-term_plan_2019

* Grow participation globally, focusing on emerging markets
* Thriving movement
* Support to newcomers
* Strong, diverse, and innovative communities that represent the World
* Strong and empowered movement leaders and affiliates
* Safe, secure spaces and equitable, efficient processes for all
participants

I hope this explains our _why_. About some of the points mentioned...

Wikimedia Space is a proposal to the movement in the form of a prototype
https://discuss-space.wmflabs.org/t/what-do-mean-here-by-prototype/188/4.
We believe it will generate interest, feedback, criticism and contributions
in a number of ways that a text-only proposal in (say) Meta Wiki wouldn't
achieve.

For instance, while we discuss here in a black & white and text-only
environment, more than 60 colorful users have signed up already and
Wikimedia Space and are getting their own impressions about it.
https://discuss-space.wmflabs.org/u .

Or for instance, several event organizers just signed up and added their
event to the Wikimedia Space map, which, if you ask me, after just one day
already looks fresh, beautiful and interesting:
https://discuss-space.wmflabs.org/c/events/l/map

We are happy to discuss possibilities for connection / integration /
migration between Wikimedia Space and existing community channels. As a
matter of fact, wikimedia-l could potentially benefit from the features
offered by Wikimedia Space (a conversation started in this list by
volunteers years ago):
https://discuss-space.wmflabs.org/t/integrating-mailing-lists-to-wikimedia-space/136

Wikimedia Space doesn't prevent improvements in Meta or other places. If
anything, we believe it will become an incentive for improvements in all
community channels willing to keep up. In our opinion, potential
improvements in Meta shouldn't prevent the release of Wikimedia Space. What
you see today is the result of about three weeks of part time work by four
people. Now consider how much time would it take to discuss, agree,
resource and implement an equivalent feature set in MediaWiki, and (just as
important) equivalent social expectations and norms in the Meta community.

We are just starting to promote Wikimedia Space. Yesterday we did an
initial announcement to get a first wave of users, see how the prototype
would take hold, and gauge the initial response. We plan to continue
promoting Wikimedia Space in more channels. In fact, you can help. If there
is a channel missing, please point to its URL, or (even better) feel free
to forward the announcement yourself.

If you have found an actionable problem, we welcome bug reports and feature
requests: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/tag/space/

We encourage you to give Wikimedia Space a try. Even if today someone
remains unconvinced, signing up won't hurt them. Then give it a week, and
let us know. We really mean it! Prototypes always contribute to better
discussions.

Best regards,
-- 
Quim Gil
Senior Manager of Community Relations @ Wikimedia Foundation
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Qgil-WMF
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Wikimedia Social: non-profit social networking service ?

[Quim Gil]

Hi Sylvain!

(Let me add the disclaimer that opinions are mine and don't represent the
views of the Foundation.)

On Fri, Aug 10, 2018 at 4:33 PM Sylvain Boissel <
sylvain.bois...@wikimedia.fr> wrote:

> Hello,
>
> It may have changed since I last checked (a bit more than a year ago), but
> while it is easy to create an instance, migrating an account to another
> instance, or moving an entire instance to a new domain is not (I couldn't
> even find documentation on how to accomplish this. So if we start an
> instance that is supposed to become an official one, we need at the very
> least have the final domain name from the start. Depending on the one we
> want, we still might need official support (e.g., anyone can register
> wikimedians.social, but wikimedia.social is restricted to the WMF by a DPML
> Block.)
>

This is a good point. Renaming Mastodon instances continues to be a pain --
see https://discourse.joinmastodon.org/t/domain-changes-and-aliases/671

This is a good reason to bet on a domain for the long run. However, let's
not mix two different concepts: use of Wikimedia trademarks and official
technical support (servers, maintenance). If the promoters of this
initiative decide to propose a domain that use a Wikimedia trademark, they
can request an authorization via
https://foundation.wikimedia.org/wiki/Trademark_policy.

> * Legal: Aiming for an official Wikimedia instance has implications of
> > trademarks, legal requirements, and so on. While there is no need to
> start
> > with an official instance, it is useful to consider the scenario early
> on.
> >
> Do you know what these requirements are? Are some issues unsolvable (for
> example, if an official Wikimedia instance implies that no movie-based gifs
> can be posted (for copyright reasons), then this instance has basically no
> chance to gain a large user base. While this may not be a problem (a small
> instance with a small number of accounts posting things like
> #pictureOfTheDay to the whole Fediverse would still be valuable), this
> would change the scope of what we try to accomplish.
>

Honestly, no idea. I am just applying the basic reasoning that the
requirements and potential risks for content and user data will be more
complex for the Wikimedia Foundation maintaining a service officially than
for a group of individual volunteers doing the same independently as a
hobby.

If you have a clear idea about what you want to accomplish, I'd recommend
you to take the lightest steps that will lead you there. Iterations,
experiments and changes are expected anyway, being this idea so new and
different in the context of our movement. It is also an idea easy to
implement and maintain (through a service like e.g. https://masto.host or
self-hosted). And economically affordable.

-- 
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Wikimedia Social: non-profit social networking service ?

[Quim Gil]

Mathieu, thank you for your research and for connecting so many dots.

On Thu, Aug 9, 2018 at 6:40 AM mathieu lovato stumpf guntz <
psychosl...@culture-libre.org> wrote:

> Although Mastodon doesn't seem to be what I was looking for at start, I do
> think it would be great to launch a Wikimedia instance and completely in
> phase with the aim of becoming an essential infrastructure of the ecosystem
> of free knowledge. So let me know if I can help in any way on this regard.
> :)
>
In my professional role, I think it is worth considering the idea of
approaching Wikimedia to the Fediverse as part of

> Knowledge as a service: To serve our users, we will become a platform
that serves open knowledge to the world across interfaces and communities.
> We will build tools for allies and partners to organize and exchange free
knowledge beyond Wikimedia.
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Strategy/Wikimedia_movement/2017/Direction

In fact, I have started some very casual conversations about these ideas
(equivalent to chats by the coffee machine, except that I'm remote and I
don't drink coffee), partially motivated by this thread.

https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T198363 is a good umbrella task. If
someone wants to develop the idea of creating a Wikimedia instance in the
Fediverse (official or not), then that would deserve its own discussion.
Where to start this discussion? IdeaLab? Maybe it doesn't matter as long as
we have one place well advertised.

There are at least three aspects to consider:

* Technical: Creating i.e. a Mastodon instance somewhere is technically
simple, running that instance in Wikimedia production servers is another
story. While there is no need to start with a service in production, it is
useful to consider the scenario early on.

* Legal: Aiming for an official Wikimedia instance has implications of
trademarks, legal requirements, and so on. While there is no need to start
with an official instance, it is useful to consider the scenario early on.

* Social: While creating an instance would be simple, having a critical
mass of Wikimedians aware of it and using it regularly is not. There is no
lack of brilliant ideas that failed because the people didn't follow. And
here you would be fighting against resistance to change e.g. from those
believing that Wikimedians should focus on wikis only, from Wikimedians
well invested in corporate social networks (Facebook, Twitter, etc) and of
course with everyone being "too busy to join another channel". Whoever
drives this initiative must be ready to work hard explaining, promoting,
supporting...

Bottom line: this would be an initiative relatively simple to start, that
has a clear risk of complications coming if it succeeds. Considering that
the likely scenario for any new experiment is that it will close in less
than a year, I think those complications caused by success is a problem the
promoters of this initiative would want to have.

PS: In my personal time I am a Fediverse enthusiast and a Mastodon instance
admin, and for this reason I am being cautious about bias / being too
passionate.  :)

>
> Cheers.
>
>
> [1]
> https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimedia-l/2018-April/089977.html
>
> Le 11/04/2018 à 11:17, Quim Gil a écrit :
>
> (These are personal opinions based on my own personal interest in free and
> volunteer-driven social networks, not an opinion as a WMF member.)
>
> On Mon, Apr 9, 2018 at 9:46 AM, Leinonen Teemu  
> 
> wrote:
>
>
> Hi,
>
> I have been looking for social networking service that would be fair: not
> abusing personal data, funded by community, respecting privacy, accepting
> anonymity, free/libre/ open source etc. Haven’t found many. The Diaspora*
> Project[1] is not moving forward very fast and the Mastodon[2] is more a
> microblogging service rather than a social network service.
>
>
> Can it be that the difference between "microblogging service" and "social
> network" might be too subtle and subjective to be noticed by the majority
> of their users? And for the problem you are presenting here?
>
>
> Would it make sense for Wikimedia movement to build its own social network
>
> service?
>
>
> Depends on what you mean by "build". If you mean create the software for a
> new social network service, I don't think it makes sense. Providing support
> and development of multilingual wiki 
> projects<https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Our_projects> 
> <https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Our_projects> to collect and develop
> educational content to empower and engage people around the world is
> already a daunting task in terms of software development, and there is so
> much to do.
>
> If you mean to run the software developed by someone else, sure, why not
> experiment

Re: [Wikimedia-l] Wikimedia Social: non-profit social networking service ?

[Quim Gil]

(These are personal opinions based on my own personal interest in free and
volunteer-driven social networks, not an opinion as a WMF member.)

On Mon, Apr 9, 2018 at 9:46 AM, Leinonen Teemu 
wrote:

> Hi,
>
> I have been looking for social networking service that would be fair: not
> abusing personal data, funded by community, respecting privacy, accepting
> anonymity, free/libre/ open source etc. Haven’t found many. The Diaspora*
> Project[1] is not moving forward very fast and the Mastodon[2] is more a
> microblogging service rather than a social network service.
>

Can it be that the difference between "microblogging service" and "social
network" might be too subtle and subjective to be noticed by the majority
of their users? And for the problem you are presenting here?


Would it make sense for Wikimedia movement to build its own social network
> service?
>

Depends on what you mean by "build". If you mean create the software for a
new social network service, I don't think it makes sense. Providing support
and development of multilingual wiki projects
<https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Our_projects> to collect and develop
educational content to empower and engage people around the world is
already a daunting task in terms of software development, and there is so
much to do.

If you mean to run the software developed by someone else, sure, why not
experimenting. Thanks to free software licenses anyone can try, and thanks
to Wikimedia trademarks licenses I am sure a decent solution could be found
by whoever wants to run this experiment.


In the "2017 Movement strategy” we state: “By 2030, Wikimedia will become
> the essential infrastructure of the ecosystem of free knowledge”. If we
> consider discussions and information shared on social network services to
> be “knowledge”, I think we should have a role in here too.
>

With some caveats and observations, I agree on the principle, just not on
the implication that this means we need to create a free social network for
us from scratch, starting with a first line of code. If we consider social
networks useful, and free social networks the right and consistent thing to
use in an ecosystem of free knowledge, then the first step can be as simple
as opening a Mastodon instance. Dozens (hundreds) of volunteers (including
amateur sysadmins) are doing just that without much discussion, just
scratching their own itch, or for fun, or to learn, or to experiment...


We have 33 million registered users and fulfil all the requirements of
> being a “fair service”. A minimum list of features to make Wikimedia Social
> would be:
>
> (1) Status updates
> (2) Comments
> (3) Likes
>

This is provided by Mastodon, GNUSocial, etc today. They look like minimum
features for a social network indeed.


> (4)Groups
>

Mmm can you specify your use cases here? There is a chance, that the need
for "groups" actually belongs to different use cases, and we don't need one
"social network" tool to resolve everything.

One use case could be instant communication. We have seen Wikimedia groups
in Telegram flourishing around events and perhaps more. Again, someone
scratched their itches, they just did it, others followed.

Another use case could be more structured and specialized communication,
which puts us closer to mailing lists, forums, and our very own Talk pages.
For what is worth, some of us are experimenting around this use case with
Discourse. Again, scratching own itches and experimenting. More at
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T180853


> maybe:
> (5) Events
>

Well, this is quite a beast on its own, and I believe not a simple one. A
few days ago I unassigned https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T1035 to myself
because I could not find enough time & focus to push this problem in some
productive direction.



> I am pretty sure that by integrating this to other Wikimedia services
> (Commons etc.) we could achieve something awesome.
>

I agree that there is potential in this area, but I would look more at
using and supporting tools developed by others on their own mission, and
then think of single-sign-ons and APIs to bridge.



>
> - Teemu
>
> [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diaspora_(social_network)
> [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mastodon_(software)
>

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Re: [Wikimedia-l] [Wmfall] New Developers Quarterly Report's first edition

[Quim Gil]

Hi,

I am very happy to see that the New Developers Quarterly report is raising
some interest. Yes, there are important problems of sustainability in our
developer community that deserve attention.

On Wed, Oct 18, 2017 at 8:21 PM, Fæ  wrote:

> Suggestion, throw away the current plan and rather than using findings
> to create incremental improvement,[1] try something completely
> different before all the wheels fall off. I look forward to seeing
> some serious radical initiatives.
>

The good news is that we have done this already.  :)

The retention numbers for this quarter correspond to the newcomers who
landed between ~April-September 2016. We can expect there developers
attracted by our hackathons in Jerusalem and Esino Lario, and the
corresponding Google Summer of Code and Outreachy rounds. It was by that
time when the Technical Collaboration team at the Wikimedia Foundation (who
co-organizes these activities with mentors and affiliates) was digging
beyond our apparent success, deeper into the problem of developer
retention. Then we started to think that we should focus on new developers,
even if that meant less focus for our more experienced technical
contributors.

Since then, we have radically changed our plans and we are experimenting in
various ways. You can find a comprehensive explanation in a blog post
published last week: How Technical Collaboration is bringing new developers
into the Wikimedia movement
<https://blog.wikimedia.org/2017/10/05/technical-collaboration-new-developers/>

Since we are discussing about new developers, let me also recommend you
another blog published just yesterday: Towards building an African
Wikimedia Developer Community
<https://blog.wikimedia.org/2017/10/19/african-wikimedia-developer-community/>
.

Wikimedia volunteers and affiliates, we welcome your ideas and involvement!
When our developer community grows, everybody benefits.

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[Wikimedia-l] New newsletter: Tech Showcase

[Quim Gil]

Tech curious? This is for you:

Tech Showcase <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Newsletter:Tech_Showcase>

A newsletter (*) about fresh software for Wikimedia caught on the spot.
Plans, prototypes, releases... Do you have a scoop? Tell us in the Talk
page!

Just click "Subscribe" and you will be notified in your preferred Wikimedia
wiki.
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Newsletter:Tech_Showcase

(*) This is a newsletter powered by the Newsletter extension
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:Extension:Newsletter>. Expect one
sentence notifications linking to the tech showcased, not lengthy articles
and prose.

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Re: [Wikimedia-l] WFM 91.7 FM becomes our broadcasting partner in Nigeria

[Quim Gil]

Hi,

On Fri, Jun 2, 2017 at 11:26 PM, shola ishola 
wrote:

>
> Dear wikipedians,
>
> We are delighted to announce that we have reached agreement with the above
> named prestigious broadcasting station to partner with us in reaching
> further audience in Nigeria.
>
> The agreement will assist us in reaching wider audience and also
> actualizing some of our core projects in alignment with the pinnacle of
> their establishment, which is to promote women in Nigeria.
>
> I will keep you inform as things unfold.
> Best RegardsOlushola
> Welcome to WFM 91.7 - NIGERIA'S FIRST RADIO STATION FOR WOMEN AND THEIR
> FAMILIES
>
> |
> |   |
> Welcome to WFM 91.7 - NIGERIA'S FIRST RADIO STATION FOR WOMEN AND THEIR
> FAMILIES
>  Keeping listeners company throughout the day with quality, relevant,
> informative and entertaining programmes tha...  |  |
>

This very interesting announcement was kind of cut. Turns out WFM 91.7 has
an informative article in English Wikipedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WFM_91.7

Thank you Shola and other contributors of Nigeria for this fresh
initiative! Please report about your progress.

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[Wikimedia-l] Fwd: Code of Conduct Committee for Wikimedia technical spaces constituted!

[Quim Gil]

Hi, as promised, here is the last update about the constitution of the Code
of Conduct Committee for Wikimedia technical spaces, happening today.

-- Forwarded message --
From: Quim Gil 
Date: Sat, May 20, 2017 at 10:35 AM
Subject: Code of Conduct Committee for Wikimedia technical spaces
constituted!
To: Wikimedia developers , MediaWiki
announcements and site admin list ,
Development and Operations Engineers ,
Wikimedia Labs , "A mailing list for the
Analytics Team at WMF and everybody who has an interest in Wikipedia and
analytics." , Research into Wikimedia
content and communities , "A list for
the design team." ,
pywiki...@lists.wikimedia.org


Hello everybody,

The Code of Conduct Committee
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Code_of_Conduct/Committee_members>
bootstrapping
process has been completed. Some intermediate updates were posted in
phab:T159923 <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T159923>. Starting today,
the Code of Conduct for Wikimedia technical spaces is enforced by the new
Committe formed by Amir Sarabadani (Ladsgroup
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Ladsgroup>), Lucie-Aimée Kaffee (
Frimelle <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Frimelle>), Nuria Ruiz (
Nurieta <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Nurieta>), Sébastien Santoro (
Dereckson <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Dereckson>), and Tony Thomas
(01tonythomas <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:01tonythomas>).
Congratulations to them, to the additional five auxiliary members
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Code_of_Conduct/Committee_members#Auxiliary>
 (Απεργός, Léna, Florianschmidtwelzow, Huji, Matanya), and to everybody
else who contributed to this process!

Source: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Talk:Code_of_Conduct#
Process_completed.2C_CoC_Commitee_constituted

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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Presentation Code of Conduct Committee candidates and community review

[Quim Gil]

Hi,

The community review period for the Code of Conduct for Wikimedia technical
spaces Committee candidates is over, and we haven't received any feedback
challenging the candidates proposed. Therefore, all they are confirmed now.
Congratulations!

Committee members:

   -

   Amir Sarabadani (Ladsgroup)
   -

   Lucie-Aimée Kaffee (Frimelle)
   -

   Nuria Ruiz (NRuiz-WMF)
   -

   Sébastien Santoro (Dereckson)
   -

   Tony Thomas (01tonythomas)


Auxiliary members:

   -

   Ariel Glenn (ArielGlenn)
   -

   Caroline Becker (Léna)
   -

   Florian Schmidt (Florianschmidtwelzow)
   -

   Huji
   -

   Matanya


https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Code_of_Conduct/Committee_members has been
updated accordingly.

Following the process described in the Code of Conduct for Wikimedia
technical spaces <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Code_of_Conduct>, the new
Committee will be constituted six weeks after the nomination of candidates,
on 20 May.

Between now and then the new members will go through some training and
paperwork. You can follow the details at
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T159923.

I expect to send the next and last update about this bootstrapping process
when the Committee is constituted.

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[Wikimedia-l] Fwd: Presentation Code of Conduct Committee candidates and community review

[Quim Gil]

Hi,

For your information, as promised. The next logical update here will be the
confirmation of the candidates to form the first Code of Conduct Committee
for Wikimedia technical spaces, and their auxiliary members.

-- Forwarded message --
From: Quim Gil 
Date: Sat, Apr 8, 2017 at 12:44 AM
Subject: Presentation Code of Conduct Committee candidates and community
review
To: Wikimedia developers , MediaWiki
announcements and site admin list ,
Development and Operations Engineers ,
Wikimedia Labs , "A mailing list for the
Analytics Team at WMF and everybody who has an interest in Wikipedia and
analytics." , Research into Wikimedia
content and communities , "A list for
the design team." ,
pywiki...@lists.wikimedia.org


Following the process described in the Code of Conduct for Wikimedia
technical spaces <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Code_of_Conduct>, the
Wikimedia Foundation’s Technical Collaboration team has selected five
candidates to form the first Code of Conduct Committee and five candidates
to become auxiliary members.

Here you have their names in alphabetical order. For details about each
candidate, please check https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Code_of_Conduct/
Committee_members

Committee member candidates:

   -

   Amir Sarabadani (Ladsgroup)
   -

   Lucie-Aimée Kaffee (Frimelle)
   -

   Nuria Ruiz (NRuiz-WMF)
   -

   Sébastien Santoro (Dereckson)
   -

   Tony Thomas (01tonythomas)


Auxiliary member candidates:

   -

   Ariel Glenn (ArielGlenn)
   -

   Caroline Becker (Léna)
   -

   Florian Schmidt (Florianschmidtwelzow)
   -

   Huji
   -

   Matanya


This list of candidates is subject to a community review period of two
weeks starting today. If no major objections are presented about any
candidate, they will be appointed in six weeks.

You can provide feedback on these candidates, via private email to
techconductcandida...@wikimedia.org. This feedback will be received by
the Community
Health
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Technical_Collaboration/Community_health>
group handling this process, and will be treated with confidentiality.

We want to thank all the people who has considered the possibility to
support the Code of Conduct with their participation in this Committee. 77
persons have been contacted during the selection process, counting
self-nominations and recommendations. From these, 21 made it to a short
list of candidates confirmed and (according to our estimation) a potential
good fit for the Committee. Selecting the five candidates for the Committee
has been hard, as we have tried to form a diverse group that could work
together effectively in the consolidation of the Code of Conduct. Selecting
the five auxiliary members has been even harder, and we know that we have
left out candidates who could have contributed just as much. Being the
first people assuming these roles, we have tended a bit towards more
technical profiles with good knowledge of our technical spaces. We believe
that future renewals will offer better chances to other profiles (not so
technical and/or not so Wikimedia veteran), adding a higher diversity and
variety of perspectives to the mix.


On Thu, Mar 9, 2017 at 12:30 PM, Quim Gil  wrote:

> Dear Wikimedia technical community members,
>
> https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Code_of_Conduct
>
> The review of the Code of Conduct for Wikimedia technical spaces has been
> completed and now it is time to bootstrap its first committee. The
> Technical Collaboration team is looking for five candidates to form the
> Committee plus five additional auxiliary members. One of them could be you
> or someone you know!
>
> You can propose yourself as a candidate and you can recommend others
> *privately* at
> techconductcandidates AT wikimedia DOT org
>
> We want to form a very diverse list of candidates reflecting the variety
> of people, activities, and spaces in the Wikimedia technical community. We
> are also open to other candidates with experience in the field. Diversity
> in the Committee is also a way to promote fairness and independence in
> their decisions. This means that no matter who you are, where you come
> from, what you work on, or for how long, you are a potential good member of
> this Committee.
>
> The main requirements to join the Committee are a will to foster an open
> and welcoming community and a commitment to making participation in
> Wikimedia technical projects a respectful and harassment-free experience
> for everyone. The committee will handle reports of unacceptable behavior,
> will analyze the cases, and will resolve on them according to the Code of
> Conduct. The Committee will also handle proposals to amend the Code of
> Conduct for the purpose of increasing its efficiency. The term of this
> first Committee will be one year.
>
> Once we have a list of 5 + 5 candidates, we will announce it here fo

Re: [Wikimedia-l] Amical Wikimedia 2017 Brand New Board

[Quim Gil]

Hola!

On Thu, Mar 16, 2017 at 3:17 PM, Àlex Hinojo  wrote:

> Hi,
>
> After two weeks of open elections, I'm glad to announce you the brand *new
> board of Amical Wikimedia*, with 8 members, of which 5 are new.
>
>
>- Laia Benito Pericas - Chair
>- Lluís Madurell Alemany - Secretary
>- Xavier Dengra Grau - Treasurer
>- Josep Nogué -  Member (former treasurer)
>- Carles Paredes  -  Member (former secretary)
>- David Parreño Mont - Member
>- Esther Bonet Solé  - Member
>- Pau Colominas -   Member
>

Congratulations! The former board was a dream team and after renewing 5 of
8 seats (and changing the roles of the previous board members...) the new
board is... another dream team!

Other interesting points:

* Most of these members are very active editors (VERY).
* Some of them joined not that long ago (I mean, a few years).
* Some of them... learned to write not that long ago  ;) (I mean, I'd be
curious to know the median age of this board) and they can be considered
"native Wikipedians".
* All of them have been regularly involved in editathons, workshops, GLAM,
Wiki Loves contests, social media and comms... as much as featured
articles, fighting vandalism, cleaning tasks, connecting with Wikidata,
administering Wikisource, Wikibooks...

Arnau Duran, our former president, was not running for a new term, and both
> the board and the community are grateful for his service these years.
>

Arnau would deserve a paid retirement, but Wikimedia is not there yet.  ;)

PS: as a not very active member of Amical I am probably biased, but a) I
didn't participate in the election and b) many people ask me about the
factors of success of Amical, and imho there you have the tip of the
iceberg.

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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Status of the Code of Conduct for technical spaces

[Quim Gil]

As a complement to my update yesterday, the call for candidates to form the
first Code of Conduct Committee has been sent to wikitech-l, mediawiki-l,
engineering, labs-l, analytics, wiki-research-l, and design. It will be
advertised in other technical spaces in the next hours. You can read it
i.e. at
https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2017-March/087731.html

The next logical update here will be the presentation of a list of
candidates to be reviewed by the Wikimedia technical community and anyone
else willing to chime in. If you want to follow this process closely, you
can check
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Talk:Code_of_Conduct#Bootstrapping_the_Code_of_Conduct_Committee
or subscribe to the Phabricator task linked there.

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[Wikimedia-l] Status of the Code of Conduct for technical spaces

[Quim Gil]

Hi, let me share a status update about the Code of Conduct for Wikimedia
technical spaces, especially targeted to people not familiar with this CoC
and/or Wikimedia technical spaces.

https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Code_of_Conduct

The CoC drafting phase was completed yesterday [0], 18 months after a
kick-off session at the Wikimania 2015 Hackathon. Since then, 142 unique
editors have contributed to the Talk page through 147 sections, 21 voting
rounds abut sections of the CoC announced through the main technical
communication channels, and a total of 2,718 edits.[1] That Talk page has
88 watchers, about 20 editors have participated regularly in discussions,
and about half of them heavily.[2] To put these numbers in context,
MediaWiki.org counts 1,420 active editors, and Phabricator 829.

The next step is to create the first Code of Conduct Committee, a process
defined in the CoC itself.[3] A subset of the Technical Collaboration team
at the Wikimedia Foundation [4] (which I am part of) is preparing an
announcement about the search of candidates, inviting everyone to volunteer
themselves or send us recommendations. We are tracking the progress of this
task in Phabricator [5] and we will communicate major updates in the CoC
Talk page and other technical venues as needed.

I hope this clarifies the current situation. If you have questions or
suggestions, please share them here or in the CoC Talk page.


[0]
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Talk:Code_of_Conduct#Removing_.27draft.27_status
[1] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Talk:Code_of_Conduct#Drafting_phase_data
[2]
http://vs.aka-online.de/cgi-bin/wppagehiststat.pl?lang=www.mediawiki&page=Talk%3ACode+of+Conduct
[3]
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Code_of_Conduct/Committee#Selection_of_new_members
[4] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Technical_Collaboration/Community_health
[5] https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T159923

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Re: [Wikimedia-l] WMDE-update: Christian Rickerts might become Undersecretary of State

[Quim Gil]

Congratulations!

Since many people in this list might be confused about the use of "State"
and "Berlin government" in this context, (if I got it right) this role is
about the Senate of Berlin <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Senate_of_Berlin>
(not the Bundesrat of Germany
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bundesrat_of_Germany>).

On Mon, Dec 5, 2016 at 1:15 PM, Pierre-Selim 
wrote:

> This is a great opportunity.
>
> Congrats!
>
> Le 5 déc. 2016 13:13, "Michael Maggs"  a écrit :
>
> > What excellent news! Many congratulations to Christian.
> >
> > Michael
> > Chair, WMUK
> >
> > >>> Dear Wikimedians,
> > >>>
> > >>> On Saturday, the Green Party has resolved the coalition agreement for
> > the
> > >>> future Berlin government and nominated their future government
> > officials.
> > >>> The
> > >>> new designated Minister of economics, Ramona Pop, asked Christian to
> > >> become
> > >>> her Undersecretary of State for the new Berlin ministry of economy,
> > >> energy
> > >>> and enterprises. Now things are going to happen quite quickly: The
> > future
> > >>> senate is scheduled to be constituted on December 8th. Right after
> > that,
> > >>> Christian would take on the new responsibility.
> > >>>
> > >>> The Supervisory Board of Wikimedia Deutschland and Christian agree
> that
> > >>> this is a great opportunity that he should accept. I also see this
> as a
> > >>> huge compliment to our work at Wikimedia Deutschland.
> > >>>
> > >>> We are aware that this opportunity brings a lot of change for our
> > >>> organisation for the near future as well. Christian and I are
> currently
> > >>> working on the next steps together with our staff and community. We
> > will
> > >>> provide you with regular updates regarding the transition process.
> > >>>
> > >>> Thank you very much and kind regards
> > >>>
> > >>> Tim Moritz Hector
> > >>>
> > >>> --
> > >>> Tim Moritz Hector
> > >>> Chair of the Board
> > >>> Wikimedia Deutschland e. V.
> > >>> ___
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> > >> ___
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> > >
> > >
> > >
> > > --
> > > Regards,
> > > Tanweer
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Discussion about proposed Technical Code of Conduct (TCC)

[Quim Gil]

technical spaces should provide a common
framework for all the different venues shared by the technical community,
and a mechanism to handle reports and enforce the Code (a committee open to
all affiliations).

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[Wikimedia-l] How to grow our technical community - Wikimedia Developer Summit

[Quim Gil]

How to grow our technical community? This is a main topic at the upcoming
Wikimedia Developer Summit (San Francisco, January 11-13, 2017).

There is a call for participation open until the end of this month (October
31). Your proposals for discussions related to this main topic are welcome!
There are some ideas about possible topics at

https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Developer_Summit/2017/How_to_grow_our_technical_community

If you are interested in contributing to the discussions about How to grow
our technical community, please join us at the Summit (the deadline to
request travel sponsorship is next Monday, October 24).

PLEASE ENCOURAGE OTHER PEOPLE to submit a proposal and/or join the Summit.
This email will likely arrive to the core of the Wikimedia technical
community, but the chances to arrive to the periphery and beyond are a lot
smaller. We need your help! We want to discuss how to grow our technical
community including the perspectives of those who haven't joined us yet.

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[Wikimedia-l] Fwd: Call for participation: Wikimedia Developer Summit 2017

[Quim Gil]

Hi, the call for participation for the Wikimedia Developer Summit 2017 is
now open:

https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Developer_
Summit/Call_for_participation

We welcome especially proposals related to these main topics:

* A plan for the Community Wishlist 2016 top results
* Handling wiki content beyond plaintext
* A unified vision for editorial collaboration
* Building a sustainable user experience together
* Useful, consistent, and well documented APIs
* How to manage our technical debt
* Artificial Intelligence to build and navigate content
* How to grow our technical community

If you want to propose an activity pre-scheduled in the Summit program, you
have time until Monday, October 31. There is no deadline to propose
Unconference sessions.

ABOUT

The Wikimedia Developer Summit is the annual meeting to push the evolution
of MediaWiki and other technologies supporting the Wikimedia movement. We
welcome all Wikimedia technical contributors and third party developers
using the Wikimedia APIs or MediaWiki.

https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Developer_Summit

(This information wants to be forwarded!)

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Re: [Wikimedia-l] [Wikidata] ArticlePlaceholder now live on first 4 Wikipedias

[Quim Gil]

On Wed, May 11, 2016 at 9:48 PM, Lydia Pintscher <
lydia.pintsc...@wikimedia.de> wrote:

> Last year Lucie started working on the ArticlePlaceholder (
> https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:ArticlePlaceholder) in order to
> fullfill Wikidata's promise of supporting especially the smaller
> Wikipedias. Today we have rolled it out on the first 4 Wikipedias:
> Esperanto, Haitian Creole, Neapolitan and Odia.
>

This is a success story in so many ways! Congratulations Lucie, Wikidata
team, Wikimedia Deutschland.

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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Are we too rigid?

[Quim Gil]

On Thu, Feb 25, 2016 at 11:04 PM, Guillaume Paumier 
wrote:

> Putting the Business case documents on the private staff wiki was the
> first step
> in my effort to rescue the process from the walled Google Docs abyss,
> where the
> documents got lost after senior staff (who initiated the process) left the
> WMF. I
> like the framework and was hoping to make it used more widely at the
> Foundation over time.
>

I also like that framework. At least for software projects, it could be
plugged in the Product development process, see
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/WMF_product_development_process#Plan &
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T125809

Also related with this and other discussions held these days in this list:

Proposal: any WMF software project willing to be prioritized requires a
concept publicly available
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T118231

and its counterpart

Define good practices to start working on project concepts privately
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T123611

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Re: [Wikimedia-l] How WMF contracts are won

[Quim Gil]

Hi, today it's a holiday for US-based WMF employees, so let me add the
information already public while a more complete reply arrives:

On Mon, Feb 15, 2016 at 3:16 PM, Fæ  wrote:

> Dear Jaime Villagomez, I have a question about a small example of
> procurement governance that I hope you can help with as the WMF CFO,
>
> QUESTION
> Can you please publish the specification of work used to support
> contract review by WMF Finance and WMF Legal for the work placed with
> Valerie Aurora and Ashe Snyder, and confirm how many other suppliers
> were given the opportunity to bid for the work?
>
> Though it is healthy that the WMF support their management team to
> make local decisions on resourcing, I am concerned that an informal
> and undocumented way of potentially selecting friends or old
> colleagues as suppliers has become a tacitly accepted default for
> placing WMF project contracts, rather than ensuring open bid processes
> with independently verifiable good governance. This appears to
> contradict the WMF Finance commitment to "core values of transparency
> and accountability".
>
> BACKGROUND
> During discussion of the proposed Code of Conduct for Wikimedia
> Technical spaces[1], it was stated that Valerie Aurora and Ashe Snyder
>

Ashe Dryden (the mistake is originally mine)


> had been given contracts for "expert advice". I asked to see the
> invitation to tender.


I replied at
https://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=Talk%3ACode_of_Conduct%2FDraft&type=revision&diff=2037073&oldid=2037016
-- text pasted here for convenience:

The two contracts have small budgets covering an amount of hours of
consulting. They were organized by me as part of my responsibility as
Engineering Community Manager, checking with the Code of Conduct promoters
and the Wikimedia Developer Summit organizers (Valerie helped us
co-organizing this event as well). I followed the normal WMF procedures for
contracting vendor services, going through WMF Finance and Legal review as
well as approval by my manager. Both consultants are recognized experts in
their field and are fit for the tasks requested.

The rest of the discussion can be found at
https://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=Talk%3ACode_of_Conduct%2FDraft&type=revision&diff=2036963&oldid=2032329

See also

* https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T90908#1859995 + following comments,
and my summary for the Developer Relations quarterly review
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T90908#1927563


> The question has since been hidden from view,
> without a confirmation that a specification for the work was written
> before the contracts were offered, nor has any statement been made
> about how much money will be paid for the (unspecified) review work.
> As far as I can tell, no expert advice by Aurora or Snyder has yet
> been made public, even though the Code of Conduct was intended to be
> created using open community processes. Quim Gil wrote "Feel free to
> continue via email or elsewhere", so I am posing the question as an
> open letter by email, asking again on-wiki appears now impossible.
>
> The WMF policy for procurement states that "Purchases that involve
> contracts need to go through contract review", and Quim Gil has
> confirmed that "I followed the normal WMF procedures for contracting
> vendor services, going through WMF Finance and Legal review as well as
> approval by my manager". Without a specification for the work, a
> meaningful contract review is impossible.
>
> It should be a mandatory requirement in professional procurement
> policies for all contracts to have a signed off statement of work,
> before contract are agreed, and only in exceptional pre-defined
> circumstances (such as contract extensions or applying formal
> preferred supplier lists) should the management team be allowed to
> place contracts with people they may happen to know, without an
> opportunity for anyone else to fairly bid for the work.
>
> I have asked for the specification of work to be published, ideally
> the budget should be published so there is better awareness of how
> much is normal for "expert advice". As the advice must be published to
> be useful, as the Code of Conduct is a public consultation, there can
> be no reason of privacy or confidentiality that applies.
>
> Links
> 1. https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Talk:Code_of_Conduct/Draft
>
> P.S. as Jaime Villagomez, WMF Chief Financial Officer has no published
> email address that I can track down, I have copied this email to Lila,
> CEO.
>
> Thanks,
> Fae
> --
> fae...@gmail.com https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Fae
>



-- 
Quim Gil
Engineering Community Manager @ Wikimedia Foundation
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Qgil
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Community Engagement reorg - the official announcement

[Quim Gil]

On Tue, Feb 9, 2016 at 4:15 AM, Maggie Dennis  wrote:

> As some of you know, Community Engagement had a small realignment last
> quarter.





> Now that it’s further along, we thought it was a good time to
> formally share. :)
>

...


>Technical Collaboration (grouping Community Liaisons and Developer
>    Relations), under Quim Gil, tasked with improving collaboration between
>software development teams, Wikimedia contributors, readers, and
> volunteer
>developers.


We welcome your feedback and participation in our projects and plans:

*  https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Technical_Collaboration
* Quarterly goals:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Technical_Collaboration/Goals
* Annual Plan: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T124420
* Strategy: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Technical_Collaboration/Strategy

In the day to day your points of contact keep being Community Liaisons
(content creators) and Developer Relations (developers).

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Re: [Wikimedia-l] How to disseminate free knowledge? Was: Profile of Magnus Manske

[Quim Gil]

First of all, I also think that we cannot expect us to fulfill our mission
by having all the world visiting our sites. A good percentage of that
mission probably needs to be fulfilled elsewhere thanks to our free
licenses and APIs.

On Tue, Jan 19, 2016 at 11:06 AM, Magnus Manske  wrote:

> We prefer people to read Wikipedia articles on Wikipedia, because a few of
> them will turn into editors, which they cannot do on any other site
> (without forking).


Even the idea of the remote contributors needs to be better explored. Our
APIs are not only GET, they are also POST. Editing the en.wiki article
about Cologne probably must happen in en.wiki itself, but there are many
types of contributions that allow for more flexibility and, in fact, might
be a lot more successful out of our Click-the-Edit-link paradigm.

https://tools.wmflabs.org/wikidata-game/ (oh, Magnus Manske was here as
well)  ;) might be the prehistory of this trend. Binary decisions become
useful Wikimedia contributions without the need of instructions or (in some
cases) specialized knowledge. Binary decisions and other very simple
interactions are at the core of massively successful mobile and/or social
games that many of our friends and their kids play.

Meanwhile, people are uploading all kinds of media, crowdsourced
translations sentence by sentence are not exotic anymore and, in general,
crowd efforts are becoming part of mainstream Internet. Wikipedia actually
inspired this trend, showing that even a goal as complex as an encyclopedia
could be achieved by us, the people, in our free time, with a pool of small
personal investments.

Who will make the connection between Wikimedia's pool of free knowledge and
hundreds of possible non-Wikimedia projects that could contribute more free
knowledge to Wikimedia? Certainly not us average Wikimedians busy with our
watchlists and routines, and certainly not us here discussing with
ourselves in wikimedia-l while the World keeps spinning. Hopefully the
connections will be made by hundreds of creative minds scratching their own
itches and satisfying their own curiosities. But if we don't pitch them the
idea of plugging Wikimedia to their experiments and products, who will?



PS: all these discussions are very relevant for
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/2016_Strategy and I encourage you to
influence the WMF strategy by leaving there your answers and choices about
Reach, Community, and Knowledge. Going through the questionnaire took me
about 15 minutes and I found the exercise interesting.

-- 
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] A common product development process (was Re: Profile of Magnus Manske)

[Quim Gil]

Hi,

On Wed, Jan 20, 2016 at 10:27 AM, Gerard Meijssen  wrote:

> So yes, we need to talk but the talk does not happen in one place. When you
> insist on one place, the confrontation is already in place.


The solution is not to move all the communication to Phabricator, that is
for sure. The solution cannot be to have WMF employees watching every
channel for feedback either.

There are two important aspects to consider:

1. "The talk" is useful when the relevant information reaches the
development team and influences their work.

Talks may happen in many places as long as there is a bridge connecting
them to the development team. Teams can listen a bit, with the help of
Community Liaisons (WMF) they can hear a bit more, but that support is also
limited. Volunteer Tech Ambassadors can provide more bridges to more
conversation, but we (all of us) still need to consolidate and promote this
key role.


2. The medium is the message

"The talk" is useful as long as it helps getting things done. Mailing lists
and wiki discussion pages are designed to discuss. Project management tools
are designed to get things done. No matter how smart and constructive the
talk is (like in this thread), all those moments will be lost in time, like
tears...in...rain.
However, when the relevant bits are converted into Phabricator tasks
populating workboards and blocking goals... forgetting is still possible
but more complicated.

This is why thanks to you Gerard, I finally found the motivation to create
this task:

Communication channels between communities and teams involved in the
product development process
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T124288

:)

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[Wikimedia-l] A common product development process (was Re: Profile of Magnus Manske)

[Quim Gil]

Thank you for this interesting thread (and thank you for the interesting
blog post in the first place). I'll pick a quote and I will try to propose
ways forward about other comments made.

On Mon, Jan 18, 2016 at 11:35 PM, Magnus Manske  wrote:

> I would hope the Foundation by now understands better how to handle new
> software releases.


I think so, although I'm sure the Foundation still needs to understand
better how to handle new software releases -- and the communities too.

https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/WMF_product_development_process is the
common protocol where we want to apply all the learning. Clarifying
how community engagement works in this WMF product development process is a
main priority for us during this quarter (
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T124022
), and everybody is invited to join.

I do think that we have many problems as software partners, the first
problem being that we all got used to this situation of
confrontation-by-default as something natural, they way it is. We are
software partners, we really are, and in order to make this partnership
productive we need to be in a mood of collaboration-by-default.

We need a climate where new ideas are welcomed and encouraged. Today
someone comes with a new idea and the chances are that the first replies
setting the tone will be more discouraging than encouraging. We need a safe
and exciting place where everybody can share new concepts, collaborate on
them, learn from each other.

We need a prioritization process where great concepts receive initial
support for planning and prototyping, and where good plans and prototypes
receive support to start their way toward production. The WMF needs to open
that process to the participation of our communities, and our communities
need to understand that this is the best point of time to discuss new plans.

We need design and build processes that volunteers find easy to follow and
participate in. There are many and very diverse groups of people (at
Wikimedia and beyond)  that would give their feedback about design concepts
or alpha releases if they would only know about them.

We need to make our deployment process more flexible and predictable,
allowing development teams and communities to agree on beta releases, A/B
tests, opt-in/opt-out approaches, first/last waves... Some ideas:

* In order to enter the deployment phase, a project would need to have a
deployment plan proposed, agreed, and documented -- which can be adapted
based on data and feedback gathered.

* For every new product or significant feature, each community could have
the chance to determine whether they want to be early adopters (first
waves) or, on the contrary, be placed in the last waves, after seeing how
the new software is being used by others and is being matured.

* Communities would focus not so much on {{Support}} / {{Oppose}} decisions
about the totality of a feature, but on the identification of specific
blockers, allowing development teams to negotiate and change their plans
under clearer terms.

This common protocol should allow us to move away from the current
situation where both communities and development teams fear that a single
strike might disrupt their work overnight, without even seeing it coming.

A more predictable path with specialized checkpoints should allow
communities and development teams understanding better what is going on and
when to talk about what. It should also help recruiting more and more
diverse participants, who could contribute their time and skills in more
daring and productive ways.

What makes me optimistic about this common product development process is
that we don't need to finalize all the pieces to make it work. As long as
we agree that we are software partners and we agree that iterations are
good, we can start agreeing on improvements and implement them one by one.

Get involved, please. You can either join the more theoretical work about
the overall process or you can pick a specific improvement and help pushing
it forward in very practical terms. See you at
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Talk:WMF_product_development_process (where
we have been a bit slow lately but not anymore now that is a top goal).

--
Quim Gil
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Launch of Community Consultation on strategic approaches

[Quim Gil]

Hi,

On Tue, Jan 19, 2016 at 3:23 AM, Pine W  wrote:

> 1. What is the URL for the 2016 consultation?
>

https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:MyLanguage/2016_Strategy is the
main URL (currently redirects to the consultation page).


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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Community Wishlist Survey: Top 10 wishes!

[Quim Gil]

On Thu, Dec 17, 2015 at 4:01 AM, Lane Rasberry 
wrote:

> It was fun to participate in the proposal process.


I want to stress this sentence! I believe many participants will agree.

There are many ways to create a community backlog, and none of them will be
perfect. The Community Tech team chose to have a process relatively simple
to organize and to participate in, doing some sacrifices along the way to
keep that simplicity (I know well, they knocked off several ideas I
suggested). :D

The resulting backlog is just the beginning of a new phase that could be
just as fun. 10 tasks have been selected by CT, and we need everybody's
imagination to find the best ways to solve the rest.

For instance, I'm proposing to select project candidates for hackathons
from this Wishlist (https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T119703) not only
because it seems a good thing to do, but also because I believe that the
people who voted for these proposals and the developers looking for
interesting hackathon projects can continue having fun together. Achieving
goals is important, but enjoying the ride together is just as important.

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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Wikisource technical issues (was Community Wishlist Survey: Top 10 wishes!)

[Quim Gil]

Hi, while I know that this is not the solution to your problems, let me say
that if you want a Wikisource focus area at the Wikimedia Hackathon in
Jerusalem (31 March - 3 April), the time to decide this is now, and the
place is https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T119703


On Thu, Dec 17, 2015 at 7:54 AM, Andrea Zanni 
wrote:

> What wikisource lacks is development to core software, not only external,
> cool tools, which are fine but in the end don't really solve problems.
>

Some of the "core software" can be developed with the help of IEGs,
developer outreach programs, and hackathons. These activities are not
reserved for "external, cool tools" only.

One step that could be useful regardless would be to reflect the most
urgent/important "core software" development needs at
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/tag/wikisource/board/ , in epic/task
units, associating the actual projects related to them.


I can elaborate further and bore you with details but, ina nutshell, we
> just need  commitment from people who can bring theirlines ofcode into
> production. As Wikisource is formally a Wikimedia project, and provides its
> tiny contribution to the mission and also to fundraising, I would expect a
> commitment of this sort coming from WMF.
>

I think the WMF would also like to have a clear strategy about the
developer investment required for Wikisource and other projects with
specific needs. In the next months we are going to discuss the Annual Plan
for July 2016-June 2017, and I recommend the Wikisource community to make
their voice heard in that context.

Meanwhile, the tiny and humble Developer Relations team is happy to help
you in the practical and pragmatic ways that we can help you right now.  :)

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Re: [Wikimedia-l] [Wikitech-l] Update from the Wikimedia Performance Team

[Quim Gil]

On Mon, Dec 7, 2015 at 11:27 PM, Gilles Dubuc  wrote:
> We now test one page using real 3G connections (from San Francisco and
> Bangalore) and test other pages using the following physical devices:
> iPhone 6, iPad mini 2 and Moto G.

Applause!

Still in desktop, what is the current status of testing with
not-last-generation-laptops-with-SF-office-broadband? When I went to
WikiCon in Germany, one of the most prolific editors of de.wiki told
me that she was trying hard to incorporate VisualEditor and
MediaViewer to her workflows, but that her "normal" laptop with her
"normal" connection at home would simply not follow with her demands
on speed, which was the reason why she wasn't compelled to use either.
"Normal" here means regular standards for a middle age hobbyist editor
in a small city of Germany, which is probably closer to the high end
spectrum for desktop users in a global scale.

-- 
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http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Qgil

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Re: [Wikimedia-l] [Design] 'Design team' in Wikimedia contexts

[Quim Gil]

Hi, this is a very interesting conversation, and I hope the most
informative bits are reflected in https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Design

By the way, we are discussing the use of the term "Design" in the WMF
product development process, as a stage involving not only visual/UX design
but also architecture, performance, operations... Your feedback is welcomed.

https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/WMF_product_development_process#Design

https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Topic:Srypura34nh1njr4

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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Superprotect is gone

[Quim Gil]

Hi Andy,

On Mon, Nov 9, 2015 at 12:04 AM, Andy Mabbett 
wrote:

> Referring to "misbehaviour" in this context is extremely offensive; the
> initial use of superprotect was not a response to "misbehaviour".
>

Changed for the more precise and descriptive term "irregular edits":
https://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=WMF_product_development_process%2F2015-11-05&type=revision&diff=1935550&oldid=1935526
.

On the "extremely offensive" part, let me explain why I typed "misbehavior"
without aiming to offend anyone. That paragraph refers to a future context
defined by the new development process. That sentence refers to a potential
situation where the process has been followed and someone blocks it using
their admin permissions. What the sentence wants to say is that, even if
someone thinks such action is misbehavior, the solution is to let the
admins handle the situation, not to use a tool controlled exclusively by
the WMF. I'm sure we agree with this principle.

I wasn't trying to judge past events. It is the job of the administrators
to judge whether an edit in a page editable only by admins is appropriate
or not.

PS: if you find room for improvement in the Q&A, you can comment in the
Talk page, or edit directly. Wiki business as usual.

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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Superprotect is gone

[Quim Gil]

Hi pi zero,

On Sun, Nov 8, 2015 at 2:04 PM, pi zero  wrote:

> it wasn't removed because it shouldn't have been imposed in
> the first place, but merely because it wasn't used.


I'm sorry if my wording could suggest this interpretation. I just wanted to
provide basic information about Superprotect to the many people that have
heard about it but in fact didn't know much about its use today. This is
also why the Q&A included more details:

https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/WMF_product_development_process/2015-11-05#When_has_been_Superprotect_used.3F

The main reason to act upon Superprotect now is the updated product
development process
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/WMF_product_development_process> in the
drafts, which we want to discuss and agree with the communities. This new
process should make Superprotect unnecessary; removing it upfront was a
logical step.

I have added these points in the Q&A:

Why is Superprotect being removed?
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/WMF_product_development_process/2015-11-05#Why_is_Superprotect_being_removed.3F

Why is the WMF doing this now?
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/WMF_product_development_process/2015-11-05#Why_is_the_WMF_doing_this_now.3F

I hope this clarifies that sentence.

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[Wikimedia-l] Superprotect is gone

[Quim Gil]

Superprotect [1] was introduced by the Wikimedia Foundation to resolve a
product development disagreement. We have not used it for resolving a
dispute since. Consequently, today we are removing Superprotect from
Wikimedia servers.

Without Superprotect, a symbolic point of tension is resolved. However, we
still have the underlying problem of disagreement and consequent delays at
the product deployment phase. We need to become better software partners,
work together towards better products, and ship better features faster. The
collaboration between the WMF and the communities depends on mutual trust
and constructive criticism. We need to improve Wikimedia mechanisms to
build consensus, include more voices, and resolve disputes.

There is a first draft of an updated Product Development Process [2] that
will guide the work of the WMF Engineering and Product teams.[3] It
stresses the need for community feedback throughout the process, but
particularly in the early phases of development. More feedback earlier on
will allow us to incorporate community-driven improvements and address
potential controversy while plans and software are most flexible.

We welcome the feedback of technical and non-technical contributors. Check
the Q&A for details.[4]

[1] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Superprotect
[2] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/WMF_Product_Development_Process
[3] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Engineering
[4]
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/WMF_Product_Development_Process/2015-11-05#Q.26A

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[Wikimedia-l] Fwd: Looking for a co-org-admin for Outreachy 11

[Quim Gil]

Forwarding to this list, just in case you ro someone you know is
interested. You need to be tech-curious for this volunteering role, but
developer skills are not required. Community management and project
management skills are more necessary.

-- Forwarded message --
From: Quim Gil 
Date: Mon, Sep 14, 2015 at 9:38 AM
Subject: Looking for a co-org-admin for Outreachy 11
To: Wikimedia developers 


Hi, we are looking for volunteers willing to get involved in the
organization of Wikimedia's participation in the upcoming round of
Outreachy, a program to involve underrepresented communities in open source
projects. https://www.gnome.org/outreachy/

Experienced org admins like Niharika Kohli, Andre Klapper and myself are
looking forward to support new volunteers in this role. We also have a
solid and reasonably well documented process in place helping the
onboarding of new org admins, mentors, and interns. This is a good chance
to grow your tech community management experience in a safe and supportive
context, dedicating about 2-4 hours per week between October and February.

About half year ago, I asked for volunteers to become co-org-admins of the
upcoming Google Summer of Code and Outreachy round. Niharika Kohli answered
back, and she has been an amazing org admin since then. I'm not
exaggerating when I say that her involvement has been one of the best
things impacting my work this year. She has learned and enjoyed a lot, and
she has been very helpful to the interns and mentors that are concluding
their projects as we speak.

Interested? Just reply to this email or comment at
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T112267

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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Collaboration team reprioritization

[Quim Gil]

Hi, (here goes a disclaimer about me posting this email as volunteer tech
ambassador in Catalan Wikipedia in my personal time)

While Flow might not be ready to make happy core enwiki contributors, in my
humble (and again, personal) opinion it is clearly ready to make life
easier to dozens (hundreds?) of Wikimedia projects (the smaller, probably
the merrier). The Catalan Wikipedia project has gone through several
iterations of Flow adoption, they basically want more, and they basically
will get more. Their goal is simple: Flow everywhere.

This is not an exaggeration. The communities that work actively and
directly on bringing new editors (with workshops, editathons, collaboration
with schools and other face to face interactions) know that VisualEditor is
a key tool. Once new editors have been trained with VisualEditor, there is
no way they will enjoy or even understand why they should learn
wikitext-based conventions to discuss and collaborate. Flow is the natural
VisualEditor companion, and new users don't even "love it", because for
them is just natural.

I'm happy to see that the possibility for users to opt-in to convert their
user talk pages to Flow is close to deployment. It is an interesting way to
let users show their interest and preference. I hope projects willing to
enable Flow in more places will get the tools or processes to do so. I
understand the demands of big projects with complex processes in their
discussion pages. I just hope those requirements don't become an obstacle
for the many more smaller projects that can benefit today from Flow. Time
will tell.

About Flow for third party MediaWikis (let me change my hat again, now as
admin of a small wiki in a 3rd party wiki farm), at least
https://miraheze.org/ is offering Flow to wikis requesting it. It works,
with script to archive wikitext discussion pages an all. If they have done
it, I guess other third parties can do it.

Anyway, did I say Thank You Flow Team?  :)  You rock, and you will continue
to rock.

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[Wikimedia-l] Career development support for volunteers (was Re: Changes in Engineering leadership)

[Quim Gil]

Let's continue with a clearer subject, then.  :)

On Sat, Jul 4, 2015 at 6:06 AM, Pine W  wrote:

>
> 1. Prioritize work on the open badges system.
>

There is https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/project/profile/916/, which has
seen recent activity thanks to Lokal_Profil
<https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/p/Lokal_Profil/> (and Wikimedia Sweden?)
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T62064

Still, as much as I have pushed Open Badges in the past, I feel hard to
prioritize this work when Mozilla (their initial maintainers) just
de-prioritized the whole framework. I'm happy to be convinced, and I agree
that the idea is good.



> 2. Make information about WMF contract positions more public. Currently,
> the system for hiring contractors seems to be opaque and largely at the
> discretion of the C staff. The discretion is fine, but some additional
> openness could be beneficial here, for recruiting purposes and for
> financial & programmatic transparency.


This is a topic more for Legal & HR. Since your interest is based on giving
more chances for volunteers to access to contract work, feel free creating
a Phabricator task and adding it to the #Engineering-Community backlog, so
at least is not forgotten in a mailing list archive.



> 3. Develop a central hub where WMF, Wikimedia affiliates, and
> mission-aligned organizations can post links to intern, contract, and staff
> openings. WMF could do this in partnership with an organization like
> Mozilla, the Free Software Foundation, Code for America, or the Ford
> Foundation. This hub might fit well with the WMF Partnership Department's
> mission, in addition to WMF HR's recruiting mission.
>

I have heard this idea many times before. Creating a successful "central
hub" takes a lot of work. A lot. It's one of those things that should exist
somewhere already, if only as a seed, and we should support more than
create our own.



> 4. Support the Volunteer Supporters Network
> <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Volunteer_Supporters_Network> initiative
> on Meta; encourage peer support and networking opportunities among
> Wikimedia volunteers.
>

Sounds interesting. How? I'm not very familiar with this initiative (I
should), but could it be one of those Wikimedia efforts suffering a
non-tech/tech divide? Anyway, #Engineering-Community would welcome another
task to our backlog about connecting better our tech volunteers with that
network (and other implementable ways of supporting this initiative).



> 5. Post monthly emails to appropriate Wikimedia mailing lists about intern,
> contract, and full-time openings at WMF and affiliates that may be of
> interest to members of those lists.
>

This is also for HR. Advertizing better our open position is important
indeed. The trick here is "appropriate Wikimedia mailing lists". Where are
the good candidates ready to apply? For what is worth:
https://twitter.com/wikimediaatwork


6. Develop an active mentorship program at WMF that encourages WMF
> employees to mentor high-potential volunteers in their career development,
> ideally leading to a role at WMF or a mission-aligned organization. The
> Individual Engagement Grants Program and GSOC already do some of this with
> their grantees and interns, and the concept could be expanded to other
> programs and departments.
>

Yes, but mentoring well also takes a lot of effort. A lot. And even if a %
of those interns does end up working at Wikimedia, at least in the tech
area we are struggling with very low retention rates. High effort and low
retention is a risky combination. We are trying to do better (which, heh,
takes more energy), but we need to be careful and realistic. After two
years of ~20 tech interns during the (Northern Hemisphere) Summer, I was
the one proposing to be less pushy, aiming for quality, reliability, and
retention. Currently we have 10 tech interns, and I'm personally very happy
of seeing that this is a more sustainable effort.


7. Continue to expand the number of intern opportunities at WMF. WMF
> benefits from the inexpensive labor, and the interns benefit from the
> experience and the networking opportunities.
>

I don't have numbers, but I think every year we have more interns? The WMF
is growing as well, of course. In any case, note that there is no
"inexpensive labor" in our context. Finding interns, onboarding, and
mentoring them takes significant effort. Still, I think we all agree that
this is an area that can be expanded, also in Engineering.


Thoughts? We can take this discussion to Meta if it's getting to
> complicated and diverging too much from the original purpose of this
> thread.
>

I'm biased, but if you want results, I'd rather log and discuss every
task/goal in Phabricator.

-- 
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Engineering Community Manager @ Wikime

Re: [Wikimedia-l] Changes in Engineering leadership

[Quim Gil]

Anders, I don't think I'm underestimating the competence we have in this
community. I'm wondering which demographics we should look at in order to
detect potential candidates for engineering executives (replying to Pine's
ping). I'm also suggesting that improving the communication of our open
positions with our communities is probably the way to go because I think
potential candidates do exist, although finding a good CTO is more complex
than finding a good JavaScript developer (although, wait..)  ;)

Pine, for what is worth, in almost every Google Summer of Code / Outreachy
round we have ended up recruiting a volunteer. Several WMF teams offer
internships, some of them filled with Wikimedia volunteers. A percentage of
new hires comes from our communities (I don't have data but I do read the
announcements). I'm sure more can be done, and I'm sure implementable
solutions are welcome. But back to this thread, one thing is to help
volunteers to develop skills and experience to apply for junior positions,
and another thing is to do... what? to ease the search of potential
executives within our communities.

I don't want to argue, I just want to know what can the Engineering
Community team realistically do to connect better our technical volunteers
with our technical job openings. I'm sure HR welcomes feedback about
implementable improvements as well. They want to find best candidates
anywhere, and they know that Wikimedia itself is a good pool. But we cannot
hire the candidates that don't find us or that we cannot find... Which
brings us back to the need to formulate practical solutions.


On Fri, Jul 3, 2015 at 3:14 PM, Pine W  wrote:

> Another thought: perhaps more investment could be made in providing career
> development support for our volunteers of all kinds. It's relatively common
> in the United States for organizations with lots of volunteers to put some
> investment explicitly into helping the volunteers develop skills snd
> experience that are useful for both their voluntary and paid work CVs. If
> more of that kind of investment was made by WMF, volunteering would be more
> attractive *and* WMF would benefit by having more ability to fill paid
> positions from the ranks of volunteers.
>
> Pine
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Changes in Engineering leadership

[Quim Gil]

On Fri, Jul 3, 2015 at 3:30 AM, Pine W  wrote:

> Pinging Quim in case he can give us some demographics of Wikimedia's
> volunteer tech pool and whether he thinks it might be possible to find an
> engineering executive in that pool.
>

I'm not sure which demographics we should look at. While we have data about
technical contributions, they won't tell us much about the skills required
to perform well in an engineering executive role. I think that if there
would be a good candidate for a VP of Engineering in our community, they
wouldn't have been unnoticed (but I might be wrong). If anything, we could
improve our communication about open positions to reach likely targets in
our community and our readership, but I have no idea how this could be
done; it's not an easy task.

Most importantly, I think the main point of this discussion is this answer
in the FAQ:

> Our priority will continue to be filling the CTO role. Once we have
> identified a CTO we’ll revisit the role of VPE, to ensure that the new
> CTO’s perspective is taken into consideration.

Do you know a Wikimedia contributor that could become a good CTO? Is our
future CTO editing articles, writing bots or reviewing code in Gerrit,
unaware that this job hunt is happening? Ask them to apply!
http://grnh.se/30f54b

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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Unsolicieted email from "wikimedia research"

[Quim Gil]

On Sun, Jun 28, 2015 at 10:04 PM, Michael Peel  wrote:

> It's good to see an email appeal sent to editors to translate articles,
> although a direct email appeal to generally add information to the relevant
> Wikipedia might be better (we don't just want translators, we also want new
> content!).
>

I'm just talking here as someone that volunteered in a first test of this
feature. In that case I was asked whether I had edited Spanish Wikipedia
(which I had) and then got a few recommendations for articles that could be
translated from English to Spanish using the Content Translator. My edits
to es.wiki are quite thematic, and the recommendations I got were very
interesting to me, as an editor and as a reader.

I guess a problem with this mailing (among others) is that the threshold
should be more restrictive, for instances filtering out editors that never
added whole sentences or paragraphs of text, avoiding the occasional
editors of wrong data, images, etc, that might not know the language itself.

About why focusing on translations (or, to be more precise, Content
Translator), I think it is a campaign that makes sense. Most registered
editors don't know about Content Translator and/or wouldn't have a clear
idea of what articles to translate. In this sense, the email (that could be
a message in Talk pages indeed) is very useful, even for someone like me
who was well aware of Content Translator and had tried in some articles.

Of course, this shouldn't stop other types of recommendations to edit away.

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Re: [Wikimedia-l] [Wiki-research-l] Community health (retitled thread)

[Quim Gil]

Thanks Pine for pushing in the direction of metrics. Any list aiming to be
operational will need to be in a better support than an email, though.

The tech community section of your list has many similarities to the list
we are working on as Engineering Community quarterly goal right now.

Ensure that most basic Community Metrics are in place and how they are
presented
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T94578

See also https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Community_metrics

On Fri, Jun 5, 2015 at 12:19 AM, Pine W  wrote:

> * Number of contributors to Phabricator
> * Average Phabricator "unbreak now" task wait time to closure
> * Average Phabricator high priority task wait time to closure
> * Average Phabricator task wait time to closure
> * Number of contributors to Gerrit
> * Number of patches created
> * Number of code reviewers
> * Average patch code review wait time
> * Maximum patch code review wait time


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Re: [Wikimedia-l] What's cool?

[Quim Gil]

At least 33 hackathon projects were developed and showcased in 3 days, all
crowd-documented at https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T96378 before the end
of the event. Unseen in Wikimedia as far as I'm aware, and we'll try again
in Wikimania

For instance, Experiment with video.js was basically a one-person-three-day
effort (but not just any person, TheDJ no less), and it was demoed with a
functional and funny sneak preview.
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T100106

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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Is Phabricator appropriate for managing non-coding projects?

[Quim Gil]

On Fri, Jun 5, 2015 at 9:34 AM, David Cuenca Tudela 
wrote:

> Although I must say it feels a bit unconventional
> since I haven´t figured out yet how to do scheduling, process flow, and
> other standard non-coding project management tasks in Phabricator.


"unconventional", "standard"... tsk tsk, you know better than this.  ;)

Phabricator aligns better with
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kanban_(development) -- see also the recent
Wikimedia Tech Talk about this topic:
https://plus.google.com/events/cg2sb5m878c8ot3nhf2uk4mii34



> When
> compared with standard tools like MS Project, on the Project Planning
> Properties realm Phabricator seems to be lacking many features;
> http://project-management.zone/system/microsoft-project,phabricator


Sure. After deprecating Bugzilla, RT, Scrumbugz, Mingle, and Trello, we
have accumulated a ton of feedback on features that are really really
missing, features that are kind of missing, and also many features that
users thought that would miss, but by now they have forgotten about. Try it
out, give yourself a week, and let us know what you miss exactly.

If you really want to dig...
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/tag/phabricator-upstream/

I guess I will start trying and learning to see how far I can get with it.
> It doesn´t need to be complex in order to be effective.
>

I'll invite you to a great dinner if you miss MS Project after using
Phabricator in a real Wikimedia activity for more than a month.  :)

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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Is Phabricator appropriate for managing non-coding projects?

[Quim Gil]

Hi,

On Thu, Jun 4, 2015 at 9:01 PM, David Cuenca Tudela 
wrote:

>
> I am looking for a space where I can set up projects like:
>
> - clean up a wiki category
>
> - set up book scanning tasks
>
> - track a survey stages (planning, translation, ad, analysis, etc)
>
> Is phabricator a good place for that?


Since the very first day of https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/, the blurb
in the homepage reads

"*Phabricator* is a collaboration platform open to all Wikimedia and
MediaWiki contributors. We focus on bug reporting and software projects.
Non-technical initiatives are welcome as well."

That replies your question officially.  :)


> I guess that with appropriate
> project/subproject separation then the tasks wouldn't be mixed with coding
> tasks.
>

Just like nobody wants all coding tasks mixed either.  :) Tasks get mixed
or apart in the way you want with the use of projects/tags. Simple.


> How is it being done at the WMF?
>

For instance, even if a hackathon is about code, *organizing* a hackathon
is not. In fact Engineering Community doesn't write much code and we have
99% of our activity organized in Phabricator projects, tasks, and sprints.

https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/maniphest/?statuses=open()&projects=PHID-PROJ-2olj6ckxwlzq3akoznah#R

Further reading:

https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Phabricator/Creating_and_renaming_projects
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Phabricator/Project_management
and of course https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Phabricator/Help, which is
ready for all kinds of users, technical or not.

See you all there! If you have questions, just ask at
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Talk:Phabricator/Help or #wikimedia-devtools
IRC

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Re: [Wikimedia-l] How to find the Wikimedia Commons Android App form Google Play? (Mohammed BAchounda)

[Quim Gil]

On Wed, Apr 15, 2015 at 10:03 PM, Mohammed Bachounda 
wrote:

> You can find the application at Github
> https://github.com/wikimedia/apps-android-commons


It was pulled from the stores because of lack of maintenance and resources.
More information at https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Apps/Commons
and
https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/mobile-l/2014-September/007974.html
(plus following emails).
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] A transition and a new chapter.

[Quim Gil]

On Tue, Apr 14, 2015 at 3:10 AM, phoebe ayers  wrote:

> Every so often when we talk, you will surprise me by telling me about
> one more thing in the Wikimedia universe that you thought of or
> created or were involved in over the past many years that I didn't
> realize you had a role in. It seems the list is never-ending.
>

/me looks at the MediaWiki logo [1], thinking that perhaps *now* really
starts to be the time to update it...  ;)

> I’m very interested in the technical challenges of federated collaboration

See you in the Federation, then (pun intended, but below two layers of joke
I'm serious). Something tells me that it will be very difficult for you to
stop contributing to Wikimedia in innovative ways. When you joined, the
innovative way of contributing was from the inside. Chances are that
nowadays the innovative collaboration will come increasingly from the
outside, through APIs and, er, federated collaboration. Let's have a
conversation with beer, or vice versa.

But what I'm really really curious about is what Erik Möller will do when
he recovers his individual freedom, not having to act and speak on behalf
of hundred employees and 'the movement'. Ten years is a lot of time [2],
but then again not so much. Thank you, good luck, and please send a URL to
subscribe to or watch.

[1] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:MediaWiki_logo.png
[2] http://www.infoanarchy.org/en/User:Erik (shared with tremendous respect
and a smile)
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Open Well-Tempered Clavier

[Quim Gil]

On Fri, Mar 20, 2015 at 2:39 PM, Amir E. Aharoni <
amir.ahar...@mail.huji.ac.il> wrote:

> The Open Well-Tempered Clavier is a project to record a complete
> performance of this work and release the music files, as well as proofread
> digital sheet music, to the public domain. It was crowd-funded through
> Kickstarter.
>

Another way to look at this project is: a small team pledged for $30k, got
$44k thanks to hundreds of backers, and delivered what they promised, all
this requiring (as far as I know) exactly zero resources from any Wikimedia
organization.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/opengoldberg/open-well-tempered-clavier-bah-to-bach
(tagged as #classical-music)

Crowdfunding is on the rise, and tags in this field are important because
once you fund a project about #tag you get recommendations for more #tag
projects. Maybe we could partner with Creative Commons and friends to
request Kickstarter and the other platforms to include a #freeknowledge
tag, or a similar alternative (this example could have also been
#public-domain)? Or maybe someone is already working on this?
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[Wikimedia-l] Fwd: Wikimedia Hackathon travel sponsorship

[Quim Gil]

A forward for technical and tech-curious people not subscribed to
wikitech-l. If you have or want to join a hackathon plan for Lyon (May
23-25), we want to know. Important note: Wikimedia Hackathons are not only
for developers, as good software development requires many other profiles,
including insightful users.

Chapter people and other organized wikimedians, your help funding volunteer
travel is welcome. Every year we are pooling more funds from more orgs,
opening our hackathons to more volunteers from more places and areas of
interest. Please send one volunteer or more to Lyon. More information and
feedback at https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T88523


-- Forwarded message --
From: Quim Gil 
Date: Wed, Feb 25, 2015 at 9:02 AM
Subject: Wikimedia Hackathon travel sponsorship
To: Wikimedia developers 


Hi, we are hoping to open registration to the Wikimedia Hackathon in Lyon
next week. Those of you relying on travel sponsorship can start preparing
your requests already now:

# Familiarize yourself with the goals of the hackathon:
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Hackathons#The_Wikimedia_Hackathon_model

# Join or propose a demo-able project in Phabricator:
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/tag/wikimedia-hackathon-2015/

# Find a hackathon buddy in the Wikimedia communities or related projects
out there: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Lyon_Hackathon_2015/Buddies

Here you have a draft form to get an idea of what questions you will be
asked: http://goo.gl/forms/MPzx8q7BBz (not a real form; data submitted will
be ignored and deleted)

Your feedback about the process is welcome, especially in the related
Phabricator task: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T88406

-- 
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http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Qgil
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Funding bot maintenance

[Quim Gil]

Hi,

On Sun, Feb 22, 2015 at 10:04 PM, MZMcBride  wrote:

> WereSpielChequers wrote:
> >One of the areas that I would like to see the foundation putting in money
> >is for the running and maintenance of wanted orphan bots.
>
> I think specific examples might help here.


... and specific requests are welcome under
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/tag/possible-tech-projects/, where they
might be turned into project ideas for developer outreach programs or
Individual Engagement Grants. You don't even need to formulate the perfect
proposal. Just start drafting, and if the proposal generates interest it is
likely that others will chime in and help polishing it. These tools exist
here and now, and you might want to try them out.
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] [Wikitech-l] Types of allowed projects for grant funding (renamed)

[Quim Gil]

I also think that we should revisit this policy. Any IEG should have a
feasibility plan. In GSoC / Outreachy usually the mentors are the ones
guaranteeing code review. In IEG that guarantee should be provided in other
ways, but it is possible to provide it.

For what is worth,
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Outreach_programs/Possible_projects are
already defined as project ideas that "might also be good candidates for
Individual Engagement Grants". I wish IEG "brokers" would subscribe to
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/tag/possible-tech-projects/ to find
inspiration; projects listed there are going through a community filter
that ;looks for wanted projects with a good size foir an IEG.



On Sat, Feb 21, 2015 at 10:26 PM, Brian Wolff  wrote:

> code review is definitely a severe
> bottleneck currently for existing volunteer contributions.
>

Yes, and addressing this problem is becoming a priority for the Engineering
Community team. See/join https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T78768. But
again, well planned IEG could avoid this problem entirely by finding the
right partners.
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] GSoC requests

[Quim Gil]

Hi James,

On Tue, Feb 3, 2015 at 4:38 PM, James Salsman  wrote:

> Please get Python and/or PocketSphinx help for Wikiversity to absorb
>  http://www.wiki.xprize.org/Meta-team#Goals
> systems in a manner similar to how Wikiversity incorporated Moodle. Form an
> Xprize team before the March deadline just in case.
>
>
> http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Proposal:Develop_systems_for_accuracy_review
> <
> http://strategy.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/Proposal:Develop_systems_for_accuracy_review
> >
>
> is ready for GSoC this year. Please go for it.
>

This is how Wikimedia approaches Google Summer of Code 2015:

1. Contributors like you create a project idea in Phabricator associated to
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/tag/possible-tech-projects/. In order to
become a Featured project idea, you need a well scoped project supported by
two mentors.

2. Wikimedia applies to GSoC 2015 and is eventually accepted. Deadline for
organization submissions: 20 February.
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T921

3. If we are accepted, students will look at our Featured project ideas and
will apply to the ones that they find interesting. Sometimes students
present their own project, but usually those are wikimedians already.

4. We look at all the proposals received, and we request to Google a number
of slots.

5. Google gives us that number or less, depending on the total amount of
slots requested in the program.

6. At this point, your project idea might have been taken by a student or
not, and might have made it above the cut or not.

7. GSoC 2015 students are announced. Projects start.


PS: we are looking for help promoting Wikimedia GSoC/OPW projects in
France, Italy, Russia, China, Japan... and now Hungary!
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T925
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Education Extension

[Quim Gil]

On Tue, Feb 3, 2015 at 3:23 PM, MZMcBride  wrote:

> The proposed concept called "collections,"


Now the project has a different working name: Gather

https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Gather

doesn't really leverage the fact that we already have
> shared lists of pages called categories.
>

I wonder how would someone create a list of pages "My Favourite Music
Albums" using MediaWiki categories. How would thousands of users gather
thousands of pages using MediaWiki categories. How would these categories
be private, how would their owners avoid other users messing with them.

The end result of a personal selection of pages might look similar to a
MediaWiki category, but they are essentially different.
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Education Extension

[Quim Gil]

On Tue, Feb 3, 2015 at 10:23 AM, Fabian Tompsett <
fabian.tomps...@wikimedia.org.uk> wrote:

> At Wikimedia UK we are looking at taking this up in broader context,
> editathons etc. and it would be great to hear of other peoples experiences
> and their views.
>

Just a comment aside about the "etc". It is important to know when it is
good not to use a wiki for planning purposes. Wikis are very good for wiki
collaboration, and other tools are better suited for non-wiki activities
like i.e. software development. The Education Program extension is good to
coordinate wiki editing activities, and it might be also good for other
wiki activities like editathons.

For the "etc" (activities not based on wiki editing), you might want to
consider a project management tool like https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/,
which can perfectly satisfy the needs of non-technical projects and
processes.
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[Wikimedia-l] Fwd: Promote GSoC, Outreachy, and Wikimedia Hackathon in France

[Quim Gil]

Exceptional cross-post. Your help spreading this message is welcome.

-- Forwarded message --
From: Quim Gil 
Date: Tue, Feb 3, 2015 at 10:17 AM
Subject: Promote GSoC, Outreachy, and Wikimedia Hackathon in France
To: Wikimedia developers 


This is a call to all Wikimedia tech contributors with contacts in France.
We need your help reaching out to new developers!

We have the Wikimedia Hackathon in Lyon (23-25 May), which is a good excuse
to focus our developer outreach efforts in France already now. Google
Summer of Code and Outreachy (was FOSS Outreach Program for Women) are
around the corner. Can we coordinate an action between you, your contacts,
Wikimedia France, WMF Engineering Community team... ?

Please subscribe and participate in these tasks:

Promote GSoC, FOSS OPW, and Wikimedia Hackathon in France
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T88274

Engage with established technical communities at the Wikimedia Hackathon
2015
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T76325

PS: for similar calls focusing on Russia, China, Japan, and your preferred
country, see https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T925

-- 
Quim Gil
Engineering Community Manager @ Wikimedia Foundation
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Qgil



-- 
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Engineering Community Manager @ Wikimedia Foundation
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Qgil
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Announcement regarding Host for Wikimania 2016

[Quim Gil]

On Wed, Jan 21, 2015 at 7:34 AM, Ivan Martínez  wrote:

>
> > > On the recommendation of the Wikimania 2016 selection Jury Committee,
> we
> > have accepted the proposal from the Esino Lario Italy team.
>

Congratulations to the bold candidates and to the bold jury that accept
them!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esino_Lario
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Esino_Lario

Esino Lario looks like a perfect location for an event like Wikimania, for
a community like Wikimedia. Decentralization is a key aspect of our
movement, and having events out of the usual global hubs is a necessity.

-- 
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[Wikimedia-l] Fwd: Let's recruit tech volunteers in your country via GSoC / OPW

[Quim Gil]

On the topic of increasing diversity, a tech task that can be driven by
non-tech Wikimedians as well.

Wikimedia is planning to participate in Google Summer of Code 2015 and the
simultaneous FOSS Outreach Program for Women round 10. We want to increase
geographical diversity among candidates by involving local Wikimedia groups
in the promotion of these programs. This, in turn, could help increasing
the technical capacity of these groups. Interested? Please check

Connect Wikimedia groups, Google Developer Groups, and computer science
university departments
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T925

Italy, Russia, China, and Japan have been mentioned already. Adding other
locations is up to you. We are looking for local drivers. The Engineering
Community team and others can help from a distance, but this won't work
without local promoters.

PS: you can register to Phabricator with your Wikimedia account, and you
can subscribe to tasks in order to receive updates -- see
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Phabricator/Help

-- 
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Engineering Community Manager @ Wikimedia Foundation
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Qgil
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Recognition of the MediaWiki Stakeholder's Group

[Quim Gil]

Great news! Finally a formal group focused in MediaWiki for third parties,
within the Wikimedia movement. Autonomous and connected. Now the sky is the
limit of the memebers of this group.  :)

PS: Stakeholder's or Stakeholders?

On Mon, Nov 10, 2014 at 7:31 AM, Nurunnaby Hasive  wrote:

> Welcome & Congratulations!
>
> On Mon, Nov 10, 2014 at 9:34 AM, Gregory Varnum 
> wrote:
>
> > Greetings,
> >
> > The Affiliations Committee is pleased to announce the recognition [1] of
> > the MediaWiki Stakeholder's Group - a user group for "MediaWiki
> developers,
> > admins, users, consultants, and hosting providers who cooperate in order
> to
> > improve the software and advocate the needs of MediaWiki users outside
> the
> > Wikimedia Foundation (WMF) and its projects."
> >
> > This group shows great promise and potential for helping organize folks
> who
> > are interested in making MediaWiki even better and give a voice to the
> many
> > non-WMF users of the software.
> >
> > So, now we have them joining the family of affiliates. Please, let's give
> > them a warm welcome!
> >
> > More info about the group:
> > https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki_Stakeholder%27s_Group
> >
> > Congratulations!
> > -greg aka varnent
> > Vice-Chair, Affiliations Committee
> >
> > 1:
> >
> >
> https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Affiliations_Committee/Resolutions/MediaWiki_Stakeholder%27s_Group_-_Liaison_approval,_November_2014
> > ___
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>
>
>
>
> --
> *Nurunnaby Chowdhury Hasive*
> Administrator | Bengali Wikipedia
> <http://bn.wikipedia.org/wiki/user:nhasive>
> Member | IEG Committee, Wikimedia Foundation
> <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:IdeaLab/People>
> Moderator, Social Media Interaction | The Daily Prothom-Alo
> <http://www.prothom-alo.com>
> Bangladesh Ambassador | Open Knowledge <http://www.okfn.org>
> Treasurer | Bangladesh Open Source Network (BdOSN) <http://www.bdosn.org>
> Task Force Member | Mozilla Bangladesh <http://www.mozillabd.org>
> Author & Translator | Global Voice
> <http://bn.globalvoicesonline.org/author/hasive>
> fb.com/nhasive | @nhasive <http://www.twitter.com/nhasive> | Skype:
> nhasive
> | www.nhasive.com
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Intoduction for OPW Round 9 (Wikimedia Identities Editor)

[Quim Gil]

On Tue, Oct 7, 2014 at 3:48 PM, Divyanshi Kathuria <
divyanshikathu...@gmail.com> wrote:

> Hello Everyone, warm greetings to you all.


Hello Divyashi, and any other potential candidates for FOSS Outreach
Program for Women.

If you have questions about the Identities Editor project, you can ask them
directly to its mentors in the related Bugzilla report, indicated in the
FOSS OPW page: https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=58585

The best you can do at this point is to start drafting your proposal
on-wiki, adding yourself to the table of candidates at
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/FOSS_Outreach_Program_for_Women/Round_9#Candidates

This is wikimedia-l, a non-technical mailing list. A better place to ask
and discuss OPW matters is wikitech-l

https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l

If you have other questions, you can ask me personally as well.

Thank you for your interest in contributing to Wikimedia.
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Sponsorship/donations to other organizations

[Quim Gil]

On Tue, Sep 23, 2014 at 10:02 AM, Ilario Valdelli 
wrote:

>
> The question is that open software and open knowledge are not so close as
> open knowledge and open data and open content, for instance.
>

Maybe I'm misreading the "not so close" part, but just in case:

Free software is a subset of free knowledge, and a very important one for
Wikimedia since all our content is digital. Free knowledge run by non-free
software is captive, as many open initiatives dismissing this point have
learned the hard way. We can't take for granted that free software will be
always available and maintained either. This is why we need to take the
collaboration with free software initiatives vital to us as seriously as
the collaboration with other open knowledge initiatives.
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[Wikimedia-l] FOSS OPW: looking for female technical contributors

[Quim Gil]

Dear wikimedians,

The Free and Open Source Souftware Outreach Program for Women offers paid
internships to developers and other technical profiles working on projects
together with free software organizations. Wikimedia is participating
again, and we welcome candidates.

https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/FOSS_Outreach_Program_for_Women/Round_9

This call is open to Wikimedia volunteers (editors, developers...) and also
to people that would contribute for the first time in our projects. In the
past editions we have seen that candidates coming through a direct
recommendation have good chances of success. It is also known that many
good potential candidates will be reluctant to step in, but they will if
someone (like you) encourages them to apply, or to contact us with any
questions.

You can make a difference. If you know women with software development or
open source background / interest and full time availability between
December and March, please forward them this invitation. Thank you!


-- 
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[Wikimedia-l] To Flow or not to Flow

[Quim Gil]

(The self-service suggestion and the opinions below are mine, posted here
with the best of my community intentions.)

Hi Yaroslav,

On Saturday, September 6, 2014, Yaroslav M. Blanter > wrote:

> actually, this is exactly what is happening now and this is what caused
> this turmoil yesterday night.


The situation you describe and the hypothetical self-service process I
suggested are different.

I guess we start from the concept, and the next step would be for
> volunteers to instal Flow a their talk pages. If they can survive for a
> couple of months, we can talk about it further.
>

Discussing concepts is better done while trying prototypes, alphas, betas
(and we have been doing this for Flow for about a year now). For instance,
I believe mw:Winter is progressing in the way it is progressing thanks to a
good balance between conceptual discussions, prototyping iterations, and
actual testing. Flow itself is progressing well thanks to the limited
deployments in some real pages.

Allowing users to activate Flow in their Talk pages would fit in the
self-service idea. If the development team decides to open this
possibility, I will not hesitate in joining the trial.


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Re: [Wikimedia-l] To Flow or not to Flow

[Quim Gil]

On Saturday, September 6, 2014, Erik Moeller  wrote:

> So we think a
> support forum like the Teahouse, and its equivalent in other languages
> may be a good place to start -- provided the hosts agree that there
> are no dealbreaker issues for them.


What about setting up some kind of Flow self-service for projects? Let play
to those wiling to play, in the way they think it's best for their projects.

Potential requirements to join the Flow self-service:

* At least one tech ambassador volunteering to act as contact between the
project and the Flow team, summarizing community feedback in the channels
agreed (mw:Talk:Flow, etc).
* Community agreement after a public discussion in the project.
* Selection of a first page to try Flow.

When the requirements are met, Flow is enabled in that project and
activated in that page. A month of trial follows, and after that the
community must evaluate whether it is worth activating Flow in more pages
or wait. Maybe at some point the admins of the project can control in which
pages Flow is deployed?

While we (Wikimedia movement) dedicate so much time to negotiate
incremental deployments of Flow in some sensitive and tough arenas, maybe
there are huge regions in our communities where editors would welcome a
test of this feature. The feedback of these early adopters would help
fine-tuning Flow and to better define the development priorities, since
longer term use of regular editors provides a more complete perspective
than power users in mediawiki.org alone.


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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Recognition of Wikimedia Belgium as a Wikimedia chapter by the WMF Board

[Quim Gil]

Congratulations!

On Tuesday, September 2, 2014, Romaine Wiki  wrote:

> Thanks all!


Looking forward to seeing WMBE coordinating an European effort to have the
best Wikimedia participation at http://fosdem.org ever.

(Tech-minded wikimedians, take note: Brussels, 31 January & 1 February 2015)


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[Wikimedia-l] Tracking bugs in the open (was Re: Next steps regarding WMF<->community disputes...)

[Quim Gil]

Hi,

On Monday, August 25, 2014, svetlana  wrote:

>
> A first step here, I believe, is have the Teams track bugs in the open;
> from my own experience, the Flow and Multimedia folks track bugs somewhere
> else where I can't even view or comment (and even if I could, it being
> different from Bugzilla would make things harder).


All WMF Engineering teams track bugs in the open (unless they are
security/privacy related, for obvious reasons), although the use of
multiple tools doesn't help indeed. This is why we decided to move to
Phabricator.


> I'm not sure what about migration to Phabricator, but I think it's an
> operations style of thing (I'm yet to figure out how to get involved, but
> it'd make it easier for anyone to work on the new features - they are
> really documented on-wiki (thankfully they only internalise only bug
> tracking atm), although so far only in English mostly).
>

I'm not sure I understand, but in any case
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Phabricator#Get_involved


-- 
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Engineering Community Manager @ Wikimedia Foundation
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Qgil
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[Wikimedia-l] Tech News & the communication gap (was Re: Options for the German Wikipedia)

[Quim Gil]

On Tue, Aug 12, 2014 at 8:44 AM, Dan Garry  wrote:

> On 12 August 2014 02:39, svetlana  wrote:
> >
> > There needs to be a central place, like the Wikimedia blog, but dedicated
> > to tech things - actively announcing everything WM ENGINEERING are doing,
> > both in products and in core.
>
>
> There is. It's called the monthly report. See here for July's for
> example: *
> https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Engineering/Report/2014/July
> <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Engineering/Report/2014/July>*
>

Lack of information is not the problem, most of the times. In addition to
the WMF Engineering monthly reports, tech-curious wikimedians have:

* Tech News, shipped on a weekly basis, to the point, and not limited to
WMF-driven projects. A great team of volunteers lead by Odder and Guillaume
work persistently to fix this communication gap. Everybody: please
subscribe and help promoting this great resource.
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Tech_News

* WMF Engineering short & mid term goals. Follow the links for status
reports, project plans, and direct feedback to the teams involved.
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Engineering/2014-15_Goals

These resources are far from perfect, but they exist today. Ideas and help
to improve them are welcome.

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Re: [Wikimedia-l] "let's elect people to serve on the wikimedia engineering "community" team!" (brainstorming)

[Quim Gil]

On Fri, Aug 8, 2014 at 8:34 AM, Pine W  wrote:

> Quim, it seems to me that the methods used by Features have repeatedly
> produced troubled results over the years, so it's time for a different
> approach.


Note that the approach of empowering Tech Ambassadors to explicitly
represent the voice of the content communities hasn't been tried yet. To
me, this is also "a different approach".


> Grantmaking has a community-intensive approach
> to making major decisions and I think the same approach should be
> taken in Features. I am optimistic that embedding the community deeply in
> leading Features would be a long-term change for the better. I believe that
> the Tech Ambassadors aren't empowered to make high-level community
> recommendations about Features as the Technical Committee is intended
> to do, although Tech Ambassadors may want to volunteer to serve on the
> Technical Committee and/or be integrated into its work. I would like to
> invite
> you and the Tech Ambassadors to participate in the discussion about the
> Technical Committee on the Board Noticeboard [1].
>

The Wikimedia Engineering Community Team can work here and now on the
specific goal of "let's empower people to serve on the Wikimedia
Engineering Community Team". We can work with the 'people' interested to
bring them closer to the development process and tell them how to
participate in it effectively.

This line of work doesn't get in the way of a potential Technical
Committee. I just think that if a committee like that should exist, their
potential members should be active at e.g.
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Engineering/2014-15_Goals and
related planning pages already today, because the possibility to ask and
influence already exists.

Anyway, I should have a shower and some breakfast before running to
Wikimania. If you happen to be in London and you find this topic exciting,
I will be very happy to share a chat with or without coldBeverage().
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] "let's elect people to serve on the wikimedia engineering "community" team!" (brainstorming)

[Quim Gil]

About
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Board_noticeboard#Suggestion_for_the_Board:_Technology_Committee

On Thu, Aug 7, 2014 at 10:52 AM, Pine W  wrote:

> Quim, can you clarify your comments about the Technology Committee? The
> committee is my proposal as a community member; it is not a top-down,
> Board-created idea. Its membership is designed to be broadly representative
> of the MediaWiki user community. The Board mandate is necessary to give
> TechCom similar placement to AffCom, the FDC, and other community-led and
> Board-chartered committees that report directly to the Board. I am not sure
> how you see TechCom as anything but a community-based organization.
>

This is just my personal opinion. Sitting here every day, and seeing also
not only the big hot topics but the many small novelties and discussions
that the tech community generates, the Tech Ambassadors are the ones
actually doing something in order to keep a fluent communication between
developers and editors today. I would encourage and empower them to try out
solutions to get the communities better involved as participants of our
development process.

I would trust a process promoted by the Tech Ambassadors and evolved
through many iterations and lessons learned, more than a committee that
went from community proposal to board approval in one go. I don't think the
problems we have will be solved by a committee of members elected or
appointed for periods of n years. I would rather see how certain
ambassadors earn the respect of their content projects and the technical
community (WMF teams included) through continuous participation, wise
words, and useful work.

Yes, we need some structure, but a light and flexible structure that fits
in our open source development process.
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] "let's elect people to serve on the wikimedia engineering "community" team!" (brainstorming)

[Quim Gil]

Meta comment: if our common goal is to increase collaboration, then we need
to excel ourselves in this collaboration precisely. If we minority of
tech-aware contributors are being confrontational between ourselves, then
we can only expect to nurture more confrontation than collaboration among
the new tech contributors we aim to engage.

So please, let's enjoy this conversation and let's help each other finding
better ideas to improve this problem we all want to solve.

On Wed, Aug 6, 2014 at 4:01 AM, svetlana  wrote:

>
> On Wed, 6 Aug 2014, at 06:58, Quim Gil wrote:
> > > - encourage feedback by absolutely /anyone/ about the next features
> they'd
> > > like,
> > >
> >
> > Betas and Bugzilla today. Phabricator should make it easier to provide
> > feedback in a wider range of topics, not only "bugs".
>
> 99% of users of Wikimedia projects don't /know/ about these tools. That's
> the problem, and your response is not reflecting it.
>

Yes, I agree. Can we do better?

I think the core of the problem is how to increase the participation of
tech-curious contributors, and how to structure it in a way that informs,
influences, and actually joins the development process effectively.

How can we increase the participation in technical matters among Wikimedia
editors and readers? For some thoughts on this topic, see

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Wikimedia_technical_volunteer_outreach.jpg
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Project_talk:New_contributors#English_Wikipedia_first_26213

Increasing participation by volume of participants is a goal per se.
However, this participation needs to be somewhat structured in order to
become efficient. For instance, having "more Tech Ambassadors" is good, but
wouldn't it be better if we all knew which Wikimedia projects and areas of
expertise are they covering?

I even think that having a sense of meritocracy among tech ambassadors
would be useful, just like it is useful at some point to know who is an
official maintainer of a repository, who has been granted permissions to
merge new code.

Am I referring to the Technology Committee that Pine is proposing? I don't
know. What I know is that tech meritocracy (and any meritocracy) works
better when it emerges from the grassroots, and therefore I'm skeptical
about any process that would start with a mandate from the Board or with a
WMF goal.

There are many smart, productive, and dedicated technical volunteers in our
community. In relation to the problems we are describing here, they have an
understanding, an experience, and a vision that most board members and WMF
employees can't match. I wonder what do they think, what would they do? And
I wonder how can the rest of us help them.
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] "let's elect people to serve on the wikimedia engineering "community" team!" (brainstorming)

[Quim Gil]

Hi Gryllida,

On Tue, Aug 5, 2014 at 12:33 PM, Gryllida  wrote:

> Could we please have some more people (potentially a dedicated ‘community’
> team) who could do these things:
>

The tasks you describe would or could fall into the responsibilities of two
teams at the WMF:

https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Community_Engagement_(Product)
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Engineering_Community_Team

Also the own development teams (including product managers) are involved in
some of these activities, as part of their development and deployment
process.



> - encourage feedback by absolutely /anyone/ about the next features they'd
> like,
>

Betas and Bugzilla today. Phabricator should make it easier to provide
feedback in a wider range of topics, not only "bugs".


> - run programming and documentation activities requested (or started) by
> community [there would be a lot of small projects, unlike the big ones the
> current Teams are working on],
>

I for one would welcome more initiatives and requests from the community.
The PyWikiBot is a good example of a team that asks us to help organizing
and promoting their special activities. More proposals are welcome.


> - encourage localising documentation for, and centralising the location
> of, all community-developed programming work,
>

Nemo has been a very active advocate, and I want to believe that WMF teams
have been increasingly relying on centralized and translatable
documentation in their releases, asking explicitly for translation help.



> - raise awareness of community development efforts across all Wikimedia
> projects,
>

This is an explicit goal for Tech Ambassadors and Community Liaisons.


> - actively encourage members of community become MediaWiki and Gadgets
> hackers in the Free Software philosophy?
>

Ah, you are touching a point of my personal ToDo list that I know we are
not addressing as well as we could. Still, we are trying to focus this line
of activity in conjunction with our participation in Google Summer of Code,
FOSS Outreach Program for Women, and recently also Google Code-in and
Facebook Open Academy.


This would be, in my view, a relatively small, collaboration-type team
> (with just half a handful of people for timezone coverage for IRC support).
>

To me this is not a task of one team or two, but a set of practices better
embodies in our development and deployment processes, and also a set of
activities that a larger community should embrace.

In fact, this is what my Wikimania session is about! Shameless plug:

https://wikimania2014.wikimedia.org/wiki/Submissions/The_Wikimedia_open_source_project_and_you

(It was scheduled at the "Technology, Interface & Infrastructure" track but
believe me, it's more about
WikiCulture & Community.)

I'm curious about the subject of you message, especially the "let's elect
people" part. What do you mean?
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[Wikimedia-l] Wikimania Hackathon wants your signatures

[Quim Gil]

1,6 days before the start of the Wikimania Hackathon... #impatient

If you are planning to attend, there is something simple that you can still
do. Please go to

https://wikimania2014.wikimedia.org/wiki/Hackathon#Topics

and leave your signature in the sessions that you wish to attend. It's
pretty straightforward and requires no commitment. Do it now!

Why is this useful?

1. The sessions with a critical mass of signatures will be featured at the
all-hands session opening the hackathon. We will call the promoters of each
of these sessions and they will pitch their intentions and goals. This, in
turn, might get them some more participants.

2. Having an approximate idea of the relative interest of each session will
help everybody scheduling in rooms with appropriate size. Note that most of
the scheduling will happen during and after this opening session. We have
pre-scheduled just a few exceptions: sessions focusing on new contributors
and sessions requiring the participation of remotes or other people with
busy agendas.

In other words, by adding your signatures now you are already starting to
shape the Wikimania Hackathon program.

See you soon!

-- 
Quim Gil
Engineering Community Manager @ Wikimedia Foundation
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Qgil
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[Wikimedia-l] Wikimedia Hackathon EU 2015 Q&A session

[Quim Gil]

Hi, several organizations have expressed an interest in organizing the
Wikimedia Hackathon 2015 in Europe. We are willing to announce the selected
host at Wikimania, if possible at all.

Let's have a Q&A to help candidates preparing better proposals with less
effort.

Monday, 21 July at 16:30 UTC
http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/fixedtime.html?iso=20140721T1830&p1=311&ah=1

If you want to participate, please send me an email address that you have
tested with Google Hangouts. The Q&A will be streamed and available at

https://plus.google.com/events/c0fgci542f8cn58o606gng6avio

You can also send questions before, that will be answered here and will
help improving https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Hackathons.


-- 
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Comment on the content, not the contributor - with staff?

[Quim Gil]

On Thursday, July 3, 2014, Isarra Yos  wrote:

> What can we, as volunteers, do when we believe staff have gone too far
> (besides create drama on a mailing list)?
>

It depends on the area and the problem, but there are enough WMF employees
with public exposure and community background to choose from. The
Engineering Community team should be able to help technical volunteers
having problems with WMF employees. The community liaisons (now Community
Engagement team) are also good points of contact.

Of course, each of us employees has a manager and a HR contact, and if the
problem is exceptional they could be the ultimate points of contact within
the WMF.

Does this answer your question?


-- 
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Call for Wikimedia Hackathon(s) 2014-2015

[Quim Gil]

So far there are no candidates to organize the next Wikimedia Hackathon in
Europe. If any chapter, thorg, or group of volunteers is thinking about
applying, please let us know. We want to announce the new host at Wikimania.

Very important: the budget for the Wikimedia Hackathon 2015 will be
discussed and eventually approved as an independent Project and Event Fund.
This means that organizers will be able to define the budget and manage it
without depending on general chapter funds and FDC rounds. This will avoid
any risk of budget cuts caused by factors alien to the hackathon
organization, a problem we have seen in previous editions. Background:

https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:APG/Funds_Dissemination_Committee/Framework_for_the_Creation_and_Initial_Operation_of_the_FDC#General_versus_project_funding

https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:PEG

On Friday, May 30, 2014, Quim Gil  wrote:

> (CCing wikimedia-l as well, please send any replies to wikitech-l only)
>
> The Wikimedia technical community wants to have another hackathon next
> year in Europe. Who will organize it?
>
> Interested parties, check https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Hackathons
>
> We would like to confirm a host by Wikimania, latest.
>
> The same call goes for India and other locations with a good concentration
> of Wikimedia contributors and software developers. Come on, step in. We
> want to increase our geographical diversity of technical contributors.
>
>
>
>
> --
> Quim Gil
> Engineering Community Manager @ Wikimedia Foundation
> http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Qgil
>


-- 
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[Wikimedia-l] Call for Wikimedia Hackathon(s) 2014-2015

[Quim Gil]

(CCing wikimedia-l as well, please send any replies to wikitech-l only)

The Wikimedia technical community wants to have another hackathon next year
in Europe. Who will organize it?

Interested parties, check https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Hackathons

We would like to confirm a host by Wikimania, latest.

The same call goes for India and other locations with a good concentration
of Wikimedia contributors and software developers. Come on, step in. We
want to increase our geographical diversity of technical contributors.




-- 
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] New Chair of the Supervisory Board – the 14th WMDE General Assembly in retrospect

[Quim Gil]

On Tuesday, May 27, 2014, Nathan  wrote:

> On Tue, May 27, 2014 at 11:18 AM, Markus Glaser
> >wrote:
> > As we have more than 1 members now
>


> I did not realize WMDE had >1000 active members!


While 1 > 1000 is true, I just want to stress that Markus said more
than ten thousand members, which is an even more impressive number.

This translates to 240,000 EUR coming annually from absolutely affordable
membership fees. A very good foundation to build upon. Bravo WMDE!


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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Task-oriented mailing lists

[Quim Gil]

We are going to discuss Google Summer of Code and FOSS Outreach Program for
Women in 90 minutes at #wikimedia-office -- join us!

https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Engineering_Community_Team/Meetings/2014-05-20
On Tuesday, May 20, 2014, David Cuenca  wrote:

this year in a Gsoc project, following a proposal by the student, we are
using a dedicated mailing list for his project.

I understand why you are deciding to create a mailing list, but at the same
time I'm hoping that in the very near future situations like these can be
solved with Phabricator, the tool that is planned to deprecate Bugzilla,
Gerrit and several tools more.

https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Phabricator

In fact, instead of creating a mailing list that will be surely ignored and
forgotten by the rest of the community, I encourage you to run your
short-term project with a clear deadline at http://fab.wmflabs.org/

In a Phabricator project all the discussions can be organized around tasks.
You can have a generic "Planning Project X" for the meta-discussion. This
will give you a space for discussion integrated with project planning and
code review.

Phabricator allows you to assign tasks to more than one project, which
means that in our production instance you will be able to mark tasks as
bugs in other MediaWiki components. Another interesting feature is the
possibility for users to subscribe to keywords. This means that having a
task related to "Python" might bring the attention of other Python
developers, even if they had no prior idea about the existence of your
project.

This way of working is a lot more efficient and sustainable than separate
mailing lists for projects. I encourage you to give it a try! For what is
worth, there is at least one GSoC project using Phabricator.

Chemical Markup for Wikimedia Commons
http://fab.wmflabs.org/project/view/26/

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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Sponsorship/donations to other organizations

[Quim Gil]

At least about non-profit software organizations that we rely on (aka
upstream projects), I agree with the idea of having a strategy of support
and the sensible resources to support it.

The easy part is to explain the principle and the strategy to our editors
and donors. We got here because these projects were also here to support
us. If they fail, we will suffer.

What is more complex is to have a software strategy mapping our current and
future needs to our own development resources and to the upstream projects
expected to provide the rest. Some upstream projects will do well with or
without us, while others will rely more heavily on us. Different projects
will have different needs at different points of time.

Being a supporter in the free software community is not very different to
being an editor in Wikipedia. Good contributors don't focus in just giving
money, just like good editors don't focus in just adding text. Our help is
more useful when we contribute with our various interests and tools,
filling different types of gaps that others have left.

On Tuesday, April 15, 2014, Erik Moeller  wrote:

> I could imagine a process with a fixed "giving back" annual budget
> and a community nominations/review workflow. It'd be work to create
> and I don't want to commit to that yet, but I would be interested to
> hear opinions.
>

Planned budget and community process are important elements in this
equation, but a broader strategy would need to be in place first. In my
opinion, such strategy would focus mainly on long term relationships based
on actual exchanges and collaboration before money gets into the picture.
Leaving a % of the budget for opportunistic support to non-planned actions
is very good, but only when the basic collaborations are in place.
Otherwise we risk to run into the known problem of supporting many
activities and many organizations at a remarkable cost, without seeing
clear benefits after a couple of exercises.

I would also start using and contributing improvements to the tools and
processes we currently have, like the family of Grants tools, rather than
creating new ones for this purpose.

Just like featured articles start with a single sentence, we could also
start with a very simple iteration, already in the 2014-15 plan, keeping
what we have done (e.g. the Freenode collaboration) and adding a bit more.
The same goes for the software strategy, we don't need to have a 5-year
plan to start nailing down some obvious conclusions that will help us
nominate a first list of partners to support formally.

In fact this is one of the reasons why the Engineering Community team has
the short term goal of documenting an accurate list of upstream projects:

[2] Cf. https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Upstream_projects



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