Well, I see nothing in the rule-book [1] that says we have to be rigid. Sure a lot of our work aligns with Reading, Editing, Discovery, and Infrastructure. But some of our work needs bits and pieces from each vertical, and even if managers and "hierarchists" [2] moan and groan, it doesn't make the need for that work go away.
I'll give you one example. This graph that Yuri shared earlier [3] has a dark secret if you click Edit twice. The data for that graph is copy-pasted into the graph in a most unsightly way. So now it lives in both wikitext format in the table below and eye-piercing JSON format inside the graph. Obviously, this data should live somewhere as a first class citizen, and be used from both the table and the graph. Yuri, me, Dario, and a *bunch* of community members have been talking about the fact that we need this for at least 2 years. So why hasn't it happened? Well, it's because people moaned and groaned and it didn't fit into our structure. So let's do it. Starting now, I am no longer going to be rigidly defined by my title [4]. I will dedicate some (not all) of my time to helping make this structured data a first class citizen so we can use it on wikis and stop turning people's eyeballs to mush with our weird JSON. I know there's community desire and support for this, it makes sense, and we're all trying to work on it in our spare time and at 3am on Sunday the last day of the hackathon. Not a great way for a complicated feature to make it out to our dear community! Much love, and hopefully inspiration for others to find and do useful projects not necessarily defined by their title. Dan p.s. this email was written with a smile and light-hearted attitude [1] There is no rule-book :) [2] hierarchists: people who love hierarchy [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_expensive_paintings#Interactive_graph [4] I am a "Front End Javascript UX/UI Engineer, Analytics" *whatever* that means... : ) On Tue, Feb 23, 2016 at 7:53 PM, Yuri Astrakhan <yastrak...@wikimedia.org> wrote: > Something in Oliver's departure email caught my eye: > > > * "Because we are scared and in pain and hindered by structural biases and > hierarchy, we are worse at our jobs." (quoted with Oliver's permission)* > > And that got me thinking. WMF, an organization that was built with the open > and community-driven principles - why have we became the classic example of > a corporate multi-level hierarchy? Should we mimic a living organism rather > than a human-built pyramid? > > This may sound naive and wishful, but could we have a more flat and > flexible team structure, where instead of having large teams with > sub-teams, we would have small self-forming teams "by interest". For > example, someone decides to dedicate their 20% to building support for > storing 3D models in wiki. Their efforts are noticed, the community shows > its support, and WMF reacts by increasing project resourcing. Or the > opposite - the community questions the need of a project, and neither the > team nor WMF can convincingly justify it - the project resources are > gradually reduced. > > An organism reacts to the change of its environment by redistributing > resources to the more problematic areas. Would small, flexible, and more > focused teams achieve that better? > _______________________________________________ > Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: > https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines > New messages to: Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org > Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, > <mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe> _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines New messages to: Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, <mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe>
