On Thu, Sep 1, 2016 at 11:11 AM, bawolff <[email protected]> wrote:
> Yes, we certainly do have issues with follow-through on summit decisions. > *nod* > For me personally, I've found the dev summits mostly useful as a > community building type thing (For the MediaWiki developer community). > As a remotee (Or at other various points in time, as a volunteer), its > rare I actually see everyone in real life. The dev summit provides a > venue to actually interact with everyone. While it may not actually be > the best at resolving architectural issues, I feel like it helps me > understand where everyone is coming from. > > In particular, I find that the dev summit is more effective for this > purpose than hackathons, as the unstructured nature of hackathons tend > to get people clumping in groups that already know each other. The dev > summit on the other hand better provides for cross-pollination of > ideas in my experience. (Don't get me wrong, I love hackathons too, > just for different reasons). > That's a very good point! It may be good to have distinct spaces for these environments, and 'hackathon' type events tend to have a different focus on bringing people in with shorter-term projects. I think we may want to look at ways to "boost signal" on input to and output from MWDS. Even if we don't have as much physical cross-pollination between devs and users as we could co-hosting with a bigger, less dev-focused event like Wikimania, it's important to retain that focus on user needs -- both as input to make technical decisions based on, and as output when we're reporting back what we expect to work on and if/how we can either assign resources within WMF, WMDE etc or if we need help from outside and how to organize that. > However, use-cases and users is why we're here, so I'm certainly not > opposed to that focus. I just hope we continue to retain this as an > event that's more talky and less hacky, as I feel that's where a lot > of the uniqueness of the event came from. > Yeah, I get that. Thanks for bringing up the positive side of less-hacky. :) One aspect of the first MediaWiki architecture summit that I really > liked but has been mostly lost, was inviting non-Wikimedia mediawiki > users. They're a group that has use-cases that we don't often hear > about, and provide a unique perspectives. Although I suppose its not > surprising that their involvement has kind of been lost. I would love > to see them come back, although I'm not exactly holding my breath for > that. > *nod* Some of those use-cases are great for potential Wikimedia-world uses too; we shouldn't forget those "other" users. :) -- brion _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
