Hi MZMcBride!
Thank you for your reply. I had to think a bit to come up with a structured way
to respond. Before I reply, I want to be sure I understand your concerns, so I
will list them here, paraphrased. Please speak up if I didn’t capture any of
them accurately:
0) (Implied) There seems to be discomfort with the level of WMF control over
MediaWiki and/or concern about the relationship between the WMF and the wider
Wikimedia movement
1) Automatic membership of the CTO seems to contradict the statement that
membership is not tied to WMF (or other) employment
2) The CTO should not automatically be a member
3) The CTO should not have veto power over anything
4) This document was written almost entirely by WMF (and WMDE) employees, with
little if any input from the broader technical community
5) The details of this charter, such as escalation to the CTO, do not seem
consistent with the ideals of the committee leading on behalf of the wider
community
Here is my response to the above points:
re #0: This seems to be the issue underlying most of the other concerns, so I'd
like to address it first and in depth.
For better or worse, the reality is: The WMF, via its engineers and the CTO,
controls MW development. You will currently not get changes done to MediaWiki
against the will of payed MWF engineers.
I appreciate that this charter may be seen as a way to reinforce this situation,
instead of trying to change it. The issue of balancing the power of WMF (plus,
to an extent, WMDE) with the wishes of volunteer contributors and 3rd party
professionals has been a longstanding one. This charter is not going to solve
the issue. But I don’t believe it makes the situation worse - it rather makes it
more clear. Hidden power structures are generally worse than explicit ones.
We chose a pragmatic approach: To formalize what is currently reality, and aim
to act not only as a committee of experts, but also as an interface for
volunteer contributors. I suppose we can get better at the latter. We are open
to suggestions.
One reason for the imbalance is that there are many casual contributors, but
there is no big community of consistent highly skilled volunteer contributors.
Even 3rd party professional contributions are few and far between. The WMF is
investing in the community of volunteer developers through events like
hackathons and resources like Wikimedia Cloud Services. Our goal is to
strengthen that community and bring it to the table as much as possible.
There is a handful of highly skilled consistent long term contributors around. I
know these people read and participate on wikitech-l. None of them chose to
comment on the charter so far, see #4.
Overall, I don't think this concern can be addressed by the wording of the
charter. It's a structural problem of the community, and it's not easy to fix.
By the way, if you know a volunteer contributor who should be a member of
TechCom, please let us know. We are looking to balance our pretty biased
collective skill set anyway.
re #1: We don’t see a contradiction. Perhaps it could be stated explicitly that
the CTO is an exception to the rule that membership is not tied to employment,
but it doesn’t seem necessary. The CTO will be a member, and otherwise the
committee has control over membership, subject to CTO veto power (which we don’t
expect to be used often, if ever).
re #2: could be debated, but the CTO being a member, and the CTO having veto
power, is a direct result of the approach we have taken to the authorization of
the committee, and its interaction with the WMF org chart: The committee acts as
an extension of the CTO. This finally gives the committee a clear place in the
"chain of command", and real authority over software development at the WMF,
where it formerly had none.
re #3: the CTO, by definition, already has the ultimate power over all technical
development at the WMF. The WMF controls MediaWiki development. The powers of
the CTO as stated in the charter simply make this reality explicit.
Perhaps your desire is to have TechCom balance the power of the CTO. This would
mean that TechCom would need to have a different formal relationship with WMF
management, perhaps by acting as an extension of the board. This would require a
lot of deliberation. Also, it would give the committee only indirect power, and
very little direct influence on development. The proposed charter is much closer
to the status quo of ArchCom.
re #4: the Charter was written by the Committee, which currently consists of WMF
and WMDE employees. Input was solicited on multiple occasions via the ArchCom
Radar mail on wikitech-l, and via Tech News #23 (2017-06-05). No non-employees
chose to comment.
re #5: the committee (including the CTO) "represents" the technical community
(which includes payed staff) in technical decision processes - it's where
management (and engineers) should come when they want to know what "the techies
think". Much better than a mailing list,
