On Wed, Mar 23, 2016 at 3:18 PM, Moushira Elamrawy <melamr...@wikimedia.org>
wrote:
> ...
>
In fact, we are not sure if an rfc is the best strategy to move forward
> with product decisions, but lets see how the discussion evolves, and we
> might explore the need for a different process, as we move on with this one.
>
>
I don't think an RFC on its own is *ever* the best way to move forward with
product decisions. From what I've seen, that approach inevitably leads to
the conflation of design issues ("does this work as designed, for whom, why
or why not?") with implement issues ("do the people who participate in this
discussion want this feature to exist on some wiki in some form, why or why
not?"). Too often this simply pits the WMF product team, who obviously want
feature to be liked and used, against a cohort of community members who
*dislike* the feature enough that they're willing to spend their private
time slugging it out. Things escalate, mug is thrown, new epithets are
coined, and the product--often as not--just continues to hang in limbo.
In future, I would suggest we always conduct some user research first—with
editors and readers, to understand what value, if any, different
stakeholders find in the product, as well as what's working and what's not
in the current design. Then bring the findings of that research into the
RFC, to provide an additional set of criteria with which to view the
product's general worthiness, and to anchor discussions of the various
benefits and drawbacks of implementing it (in some form, at some point, on
some wiki) in direct evidence from a more diverse set of stakeholders.
Jonathan
> [0] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Requests_for_comment/Related_Pages
>
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--
Jonathan T. Morgan
Senior Design Researcher
Wikimedia Foundation
User:Jmorgan (WMF) <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Jmorgan_(WMF)>
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