Hi folks, At the Zurich Hackathon, I met with a couple of folks from WM-CH who were interested in talking about ways that chapters can get involved in engineering/product development, similar to WM-DE's work on Wikidata.
My recommendation to them was to consider working on GLAM-related tooling. This includes helping improve some of the reporting tools currently running in Labs (primarily developed by the illustrious and wonderful Magnus Manske in his spare time), but also meeting other requirements identified by the GLAM community [1] and potentially helping with the development of more complex MediaWiki-integrated tools like the GLAMWiki-Toolset. There's work that only WMF is well positioned to do (like feeding all media view data into Hadoop and providing generalized reports and APIs), but a lot of work in the aforementioned categories could be done by any chapter and could easily be scaled up from 1 to 2 to 3 FTEs and beyond as warranted. That's because a lot of the tools are separate from MediaWiki, so code review and integration requirements are lower, and it's easier for technically proficient folks to help. In short, I think this could provide a nice on-ramp for a chapter or chapters to support the work of volunteers in the cultural sector with appropriate technology. This availability of appropriate technology is clearly increasingly a distinguishing factor for Wikimedia relative to more commercial offerings in its appeal to the cultural sector. At the same time, WMF itself doesn't currently prioritize work with the cultural sector very highly, which I think is appropriate given all the other problems we have to solve. So if this kind of work has to compete for attention with much more basic improvements to say the uploading pipeline or the editing tools, it's going to lose. Therefore I think having a "cultural tooling" team or teams in the larger movement would be appropriate. I've not heard back from WM-CH yet on this, but I also don't think it's an exclusive suggestion, so wanted to put the idea in people's heads in case other organizations in the movement want to help with it. I do want WMF to solve the larger infrastructure problems, but the more specialized tooling is likely _not_ going to be high on our agenda anytime soon. Thanks, Erik [1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a2/Report_on_requirements_for_usage_and_reuse_statistics_for_GLAM_content.pdf -- Erik Möller VP of Engineering and Product Development, Wikimedia Foundation _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, <mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe>
