Well, this is probably my last post on this subject for now. I think I've made my points. Those who don't get them yet probably will continue not to get them, and those who get them but disagree probably will continue to disagree. It looks like nothing big is going to change right now, but I hope that when Danese gets up to this, we'll see real improvements and not just attempts to paper over the problem without properly understanding it.
I'll just make a few further brief points to reiterate some things I said that seem to still be misunderstood: On Sun, Sep 5, 2010 at 10:27 PM, Tim Starling <tstarl...@wikimedia.org> wrote: > I don't think you really know that. It's hard to see how much work > goes on behind closed doors when you only have a cursory involvement > with the project. It's pretty easy to figure out that there aren't daily (or weekly or monthly) face-to-face meetings among developers who live scattered across the world. > None of the open source projects I've been involved with fit the model > you describe. For instance, Squid makes heavy use of face-to-face > meetings, despite their geographically distributed development team. Just to be clear: face-to-face meetings are great, in moderation. I'm totally in favor of them. But having lots of conferences is not the same as working in an office together. > I think that's a false dichotomy. It is. There's a spectrum of middle ground in between, but the endpoints are perfectly tenable as well. I think that, given Wikimedia's mission as well as practical concerns, moving MediaWiki development significantly further toward openness would be a good thing. >> I can say that despite being a nobody at Mozilla and having gotten >> only one (rather trivial) patch accepted, I feel like I'm taken more >> seriously by most of their paid developers than by most of ours. > > I'm sorry to hear that, and I'd like to know (off list) which paid > developers are making you feel that way. It would be unfair to name anyone, in public or in private. If I've had negative experiences with some paid developers, that should really count in their favor, because it means I have had *some* experience interacting with them, period. If we exclude paid developers who were preexisting community members: * I can think of two who I see with any regularity in #mediawiki. * I can think of maybe three who I've had more than one conversation with on IRC ever. * I don't think I've ever seen a wikitech-l post from the majority of them. I can't think why most of them should even know who I am, except now maybe some disgruntled volunteer who's making trouble for them. Why would I *expect* them to respect me? On Tue, Sep 7, 2010 at 8:29 PM, Ryan Kaldari <rkald...@wikimedia.org> wrote: > 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. 1) Either paid developers are coordinating someplace where volunteers don't see it, or they're not coordinating at all. The latter is implausible, so it's the former. It makes no difference if it's face-to-face meetings, teleconferences, IRC, or mailing lists, or even a technically public place that volunteers don't know about -- it's hidden. 2) The secret IRC channel is not low-traffic. The 1000th line before now in #wikimedia-tech (excluding parts/joins/etc., also excluding /me for simplicity) was about five days ago: $ grep -v '[^ ]* [^ ]* \*' FreeNode-#wikimedia-tech.log | tail -n 1000 | head -n 1 100903 16:08:55 <jps> and if you are only doing those in groups of 10, you need to multiply by at least 3 Doing the same on my log of the secret channel gives 100903 00:03:40, meaning it has roughly the same traffic level as #wikimedia-tech over that period. Anyone who hangs out there can tell you that almost nothing there is secret. I can't speak for private-l, because I'm not on it. > 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. If the goal is to attract volunteers and make them feel part of the community, it doesn't matter whether the paid people think they're doing a good enough job. It matters whether the volunteers think it. I'm pretty sure it's clear by now that practically none of us do. As I said, anyone interested in fixing the problem would do well to start by surveying volunteers rather than looking at the issue from their own perspective, and Danese told me she does plan to do that -- so I'll wait. _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
