On 2010-09-07, Ryan Kaldari wrote: > I am both a long-time community member and a new WMF paid developer (in > the SF office) so I think I'm in a unique position to clear up some > misconceptions. > > First of all, all this talk of secret listservs and IRC channels is > malarkey. Yes, there are private listservs and IRC channels. All of them > are private for very specific and well-established reasons. Most of them > are only used in very specific circumstances (for example if there was a > security breach that needed to be discussed privately) and tend to be > very low traffic. They are not the places where important decisions are > made.
This has been repeated several times in this thread. But from a volunteers perspective it is difficult to imagine where discussion between staff members is going on then. Until after this topic started I have seen very little discussion of staff projects on this mailing list, no discussion on the IRC channel, and very little on the MediaWiki wiki. These are three of the main enshrined development channels, and up until this discussion of staff activity on them was minimal. I find it difficult to believe that this is all the discussion that is going on, or is everything else in face to face meetings - if so where are the minutes and notes for these, because MediaWiki.org seems the obvious place to put them? And furthermore where is all the project documentation that you say has been produced? Sorry, but from the point of view of a volunteer the only logical reason there is/was no activity in any of these development channels is that there must be various private ones. > Secondly, the idea that developers here in the office don't interact > with the community is absurd. The developers here interact with the > community constantly. We discuss community opinion and ideas, we talk > with community members all day long on IRC, listservs, and on-wiki. I'm > amazed that the developers here ever get anything done considering how > much time they spend documenting what they are working on and > interacting with the community about it. The problem is they can't > interact with everyone everywhere: Code Review, IRC, listservs, the Tech > Blog, meta, Signpost, etc. So no matter what, someone is going to feel > like they are out of the loop. This may well be true for the community in general, but this discussion is specifically about the volunteer developer community, which is clearly being left out of the loop in a large respect - otherwise this discussion would not exist. They are arguably the most important members of the community from a technology perspective as volunteer developers have the time and initiative to actively improve MediaWiki, and development cannot survive on ideas and feedback alone. By readily involving the dev. community the WMF creates an environment where there is the potential (not everything will recieve a community response, but the potential for it then exists) for more ideas are implemented cost-free, and paid development time can be focused more on what it needs to be to maximise gain for all stakeholders. > > The WMF is extremely interested in new developers interacting with the > community, indeed they try to hire developers from within the community > when possible. The notion that the foundation is hiring corporate drones > who are only going to listen to their task masters is completely > unfounded. Yes, there have been situations where the foundation has been > given grant money for very specifically defined projects and those > projects have been implemented without adequate community involvement. > Everyone (including the foundation) knows that that's not how we want to > do development in the future. As has been discussed throughout the past > year, the foundation wants to move away from accepting any money with > strings attached and away from relying on grants in general. Hopefully, > if this year's fundraiser goes well, we won't have to worry about these > issues in the future. There is nothing wrong with recieiving technology grants for specific projects, and with the correct transparency and integration I think they can be a good thing as they are likely to improve areas that were previously ignored and bring new developers, and their insight, on to the paid staff. Transparency and integration were the main things the usability initiative lacked, but on their whole the contribution to MediaWiki and the WMF projects is undoubtedly very large. Robert _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
