Re: [Wikimedia-l] [Wikitech-l] [Wikimedia Announcements] Changes to Product and Technology departments at the Foundation

[James Hare]

Multimedia was recently moved to the Reading (now Readers) vertical. To the
best of my knowledge that isn’t changing.

On June 12, 2017 at 12:52:44 PM, Pine W (wiki.p...@gmail.com) wrote:

James: thanks for asking; I'm copying that question to the Wikitech list.
While we're on that topic, what's happening to multimedia? I believe that
at one time there was a multimedia team, and I could understand how pairing
multimedia with maps in the same team could make sense. If multimedia is
separate, it would be good to know where that's being housed now; I believe
that there's work happening with 3D files for Commons, and I vaguely recall
hearing about improvements to the Commons upload wizard.

Pine


On Mon, Jun 12, 2017 at 8:07 AM, James Heilman  wrote:

> Looks like a reasonable change. Glad to see the degree of internal input
> that went into it.
>
> Does maps also include other rich content like graphs, charts, heat maps
> and other forms of data visualization?
>
> Best
> James
>
> On Mon, Jun 12, 2017 at 8:44 AM, Toby Negrin 
> wrote:
>
> > Hi Jan --
> >
> > Thanks for the question. We'll be making a more specific announcement
> this
> > week about the future of the discovery projects. Sadly we don't have a
> lot
> > of new information for maps in particular and will need to do a bit more
> > scenario planning before we talk to the community.
> >
> > As far as focus, most of our "reading" features are actually content
> > created by editors that is consumed by readers and maps is no different.
> > While we don't have specifics as far as the roadmap, both authoring and
> > consumption features are totally in scope.
> >
> > Hope this helps to provide some information (if not clarity :) about how
> we
> > are approaching this.
> >
> > -Toby
> >
> > On Thu, Jun 8, 2017 at 2:21 PM, Jan Ainali  wrote:
> >
> > > 2017-06-07 23:12 GMT+02:00 Toby Negrin :
> > >
> > > >
> > > > The team working on maps, the search experience, and the project
> entry
> > > > portals (such as Wikipedia.org) will join the Readers team. This
> > > > realignment will allow us to build more integrated experiences and
> > > > knowledge-sharing for the end user.
> > > >
> > > Does maps going to readers mean that there will be less focus on
> editors
> > > tools for adding maps to articles and more focus on the readers
> > possibility
> > > to interact with the maps? If so, what is actually in the pipeline for
> > > maps?
> > >
> > > /Jan
> > > ___
> > > Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/
> > > wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/
> > > wiki/Wikimedia-l
> > > New messages to: Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org
> > > Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l,
> > > 
> > >
> > ___
> > Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/
> > wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/
> > wiki/Wikimedia-l
> > New messages to: Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org
> > Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l,
> > 
> >
>
>
>
> --
> James Heilman
> MD, CCFP-EM, Wikipedian
>
> The Wikipedia Open Textbook of Medicine
> ___
> Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/
> wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/
> wiki/Wikimedia-l
> New messages to: Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org
> Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l,
> 
>
___
Wikitech-l mailing list
wikitec...@lists.wikimedia.org
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
___
Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: 
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and 
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l
New messages to: Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org
Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, 

Re: [Wikimedia-l] [Wikitech-l] [Wikimedia Announcements] Changes to Product and Technology departments at the Foundation

[Victoria Coleman]

Hi Pine,

the wording in quotes bellow refers to the Technology Department. We have made 
the change this year (and we will continue down this path in future years) in 
order to be able to articulate clearly the impact our work has on the mission 
and the movement. In the Tech world it’s really easy to get lost in what we do 
vs why we do it and this programmatic focus across all of our work will let us 
be much clearer on the impact we are aiming for. We hope that this transparency 
will allow us to have broader conversations with the community about our work  
and our direction. It’s a change for us and we are working to implement it in 
the way we report on our work but we are looking forward to sharing our 
progress with the community in the coming months. Meantime you may want to take 
a look at 
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Annual_Plan/2017-2018/Draft/Staff_and_Contractors
 

 where we are reporting out our investments for fiscal 2017-18 both on a per 
program as well as per team basis. So that we can easily tell what we are 
investing in what initiatives. 

All the best,

Victoria

> On Jun 7, 2017, at 7:20 PM, Pine W  wrote:
> 
> Hi Toby,
> 
> Thanks for sharing the reorg information. From my perspective as an
> outsider, this sounds good.
> 
> I have a question about the sentences "The biggest change is that all of
> our work in fiscal year 2017-2018 will be structured and reported in
> programs instead of teams (you can see how this works in our proposed
> 2017-2018 Annual Plan). This will help us focus on the collective impact we
> want to make, rather than limiting ourselves to the way our organization is
> structured."
> 
> I would like to see WMF move fully to project-based budgeting (there are a
> variety of names for similar approaches), and the change that you describe
> here sounds like a step in that direction. Will WMF move fully to
> project-based budgeting by the time of the 2018-2019 Annual Plan? That
> would involve each project (such as "redesign of www.wikimediafoundation.org")
> having a project budget, and the collection of chosen projects with their
> budgets would constitute the Annual Plan. (The methodology for choosing
> projects varies among organizations that do this kind of budgeting; I would
> imagine that WMF could use its values, the outcomes of the strategy
> process, and the annual Board guidance about the budget as major factors in
> selecting projects.)
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> Pine
> 
> 
> On Wed, Jun 7, 2017 at 2:12 PM, Toby Negrin  wrote:
> 
>> Hi everybody,
>> 
>> We have made some changes to our Product and Technology departments which
>> we are excited to tell you about. When Wes Moran, former Vice President of
>> Product, left the Wikimedia Foundation in May, we took the opportunity to
>> review the organization and operating principles that were guiding Product
>> and Technology. Our objectives were to improve our engagement with the
>> community during product development, develop a more audience-based
>> approach to building products, and create as efficient a pipeline as
>> possible between an idea and its deployment. We also wanted an approach
>> that would better prepare our engineering teams to plan around the upcoming
>> movement strategic direction. We have finished this process and have some
>> results to share with you.
>> 
>> Product is now known as Audiences, and other changes in that department
>> 
>> In order to more intentionally commit to a focus on the needs of users, we
>> are making changes to the names of teams and department (and will be using
>> these names throughout the rest of this update):
>> 
>>   -
>> 
>>   The Product department will be renamed the Audiences department;
>>   -
>> 
>>   The Editing team will now be called the Contributors team;
>>   -
>> 
>>   The Reading team will be renamed the Readers team.
>> 
>> You might be asking: what does “audience” mean in this context? We define
>> it as a specific group of people who will use the products we build. For
>> example, “readers” is one audience. “Contributors” is another. Designing
>> products around who will be utilizing them most, rather than what we would
>> like those products to do, is a best practice in product development. We
>> want our organizational structure to support that approach.
>> 
>> We are making five notable changes to the Audiences department structure.
>> 
>> The first is that we are migrating folks working on search and discovery
>> from the stand-alone Discovery team into the Readers team and Technology
>> department, respectively. Specifically, the team working on our search
>> backend infrastructure will move to Technology, where they will report to
>> Victoria. The team working on maps, the search experience, and the project
>> entry portals (such as Wikipedia.org) will join the