Hi Quim, Thanks for the response, and thanks for responding for my request to talk about this at the upcoming IRC meeting:
<https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T141938#2613005> I've got a lot of thoughts about your response, but I'm going to zero in on the central thing that's confusing me (paraphrasing liberally inline below): On Wed, Sep 7, 2016 at 4:24 AM, Quim Gil <q...@wikimedia.org> wrote: > By agreeing on a few main focus areas > beforehand and "curating" them (assuring the the right people are invited > and the right topics are addressed), we could leave more freedom of > self-organization to all the rest. > [...] > One way to get there is to have WMF Product selecting these challenges with > feedback from the Technology department and have Community Tech selecting > the challenges from Community Wishlist tasks, all this while keeping > listening the discussion in wikitech-l. > [...] > [making the scope of invitations be "participants in wikitech-l". > goes in the opposite direction of > the "opening up" that we have been pushing, and that moved Brion to start > this thread. I think we can find ways to assure that "wikitech-l people and > concerns" are addressed, while assuring that the opening up keeps happening. It's hard for me to read this as anything but "WMF Product selects the topics, and then 'listens' for objections on wikitech-l". That seems the opposite of "opening up" to me, but rather seems to be about disintermediating wikitech-l discussion. Is your sense that the correct direction for us is for someone to provide more top-down direction instead of wikitech-l conversation? I'm going to repeat my rationale for wanting to emphasize wikitech-l. Wikitech-l has long been our "paper of record" for Wikimedia technical decision making. To the extent that causes us to ask the question "ok, what's the goal of wikitech-l?", then I think that makes this a success. We only hold WikiDev once a year, but wikitech-l is active all year long. Let's figure out why we're using this mailing list to write messages at each other. Rob _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
