utter and complete rubbish as it excludes the community and leaves all development within corporate hands; All against free software philosophy and/or community involvement
programming should be a hobby, like editing articles svetlana On Sat, 9 Aug 2014, at 23:27, Gilles Dubuc wrote: > This is an idea I've had for a while, and I'd like to see if there's any > interest, or on the contrary concerns, about it. I would like to explore > (and if I have official blessing, champion) the idea of asking corporations > with software engineering staff if they would be willing to let their > employees volunteer their expertise and time to mediawiki while ideally > still being on their employer's payroll. I mean engineering in the wide > sense of the term, including Ops, QA, etc. and maybe even UX. > > This would allow engineers to take a break for a predetermined duration > from their usual work duties and contribute in a very productive manner to > our open source projects. And maybe to other open source projects than > mediawiki, but I think our project in particular is a great starting point. > I see this as a flexible scheme. It doesn't really matter if people can do > it for a day, a month, or a year, I believe that these inter-organization > exchanges could have great value. > > *Background* > > Earlier this year the WMF's Multimedia team, which I'm a part of, had a > volunteer working full-time with us, Aaron Arcos. Aaron used to work at > Google and left to spend a year offering his software engineering skills to > several non-profits. His work with us, bringing his experience from large > projects at Google, was invaluable. He mentioned that when he told his > former Google co-workers about his idea, some were interested and tempted > to follow his example. > > As some of you may now, Facebook is currently lending the WMF engineering > resources in order to help with our HHVM deployment to production. > > From my subjective perspective, as someone who's paid to be a software > engineer, I would definitely enjoy the ability to do something like that at > certain points of my career. There's always a lot to learn by being thrown > into the deep end of another organization's software development. > > In fact, in the corporate world, Twitter and Etsy have identified these > benefits and are doing this between themselves: > http://thenextweb.com/insider/2012/09/11/twitter-etsy-run-engineer-exchange-learn/ > > In our own wiki world, we have Wikipedians in residence: > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedian_in_residence > > *The idea* > > This is my take on it, and I'm really interested to hear some feedback and > brainstorm on this. I think that starting talking to interested parties > will be what gives shape and structure to the idea. > > First and foremost I would see this outreach aimed at the engineers > themselves. Because worst case scenario, if their employer isn't willing to > donate continued payroll for that person while they're in residence, we > should facilitate people like Aaron Arcos who are willing to donate their > time and skills entirely for free. There may be engineers out there at the > Googles and Facebooks of the world who don't know or might forget that they > could help projects like mediawiki greatly if they took a break from their > job and worked on open source for a while. > > Secondly, I think that such a scheme would be easily pitched to companies > (including other non-profits) as a training opportunity. As much as > experienced engineers coming into the project have a lot to teach us, we > also have a lot of interesting knowledge to teach in return, and the > experience of working on this codebase alone, the scale of the traffic > we're dealing with, etc., can have incredible training value. > > I imagine this scheme as being entirely flexible. For a short period or a > long period, still paid by their former employer or not, we should foster > experienced engineers participating in our project for a period of time. We > already participate in outreach to people with less experienced developers > through GSoC and similar (maybe we're not doing enough of that for some > people, but that's another topic!), and I think there is an unexplored > opportunity in trying to do this with experienced folks. > > Lastly, while everything I describe here is probably possible on an > individual basis and does happen occasionally, I believe that having a > catchy name (eg. "engineers in residence"), and an official scheme for it > would greatly increase the frequency of it happening. > > I could keep going on and on about this, but let's see what others think > based on this rough idea. And if you're at Wikimania right now and are > interested in discussing this topic, find me. > _______________________________________________ > Wikitech-l mailing list > [email protected] > https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
