Hi Asaf,
That's a good response, but I'm not sure it provides a practical way
forward. How can volunteers bring this issue to the attention of the WMF
leadership to get the allocation of the time of Wikimedia staff who can
take ownership implement changes here?
Presumably emails on these lists have relatively little impact at the
most senior levels, so they aren't a good way forward - and similarly on
Phabricator.
The Wishlist provides a way of showcasing issues and a relatively clear
way forward to get them implemented, but with really limited capacity.
How would a case for technical support be made apart from that? It's not
clear if a simple survey would be sufficient. Would an RfC and
discussion on meta help? Does it need the media to be involved to make
it a public crisis? Or should it be proposed as a grant request, perhaps
for a Wikimedia affiliate to implement? Or is there another avenue that
could be persued? Bearing in mind that there's no practical way for
community members to propose changes to the WMF annual plan for multiple
years now.
Sorry to defocus things and express more frustration, but I think there
should be a clear way forward with this type of issue, which isn't
obvious right now. Personally, my hopes are on the Wishlist, although
I'll be reposting a 14-year-old issue there for the fifth time when that
process opens on the 10th January...
Thanks,
Mike
On 1/1/22 20:10:43, Asaf Bartov wrote:
Writing in my volunteer capacity:
On Sat, 1 Jan 2022, 08:43 Amir Sarabadani <ladsgr...@gmail.com
<mailto:ladsgr...@gmail.com>> wrote:
Honestly, the situation is more dire than you think. For example,
until a couple months ago, we didn't have backups for the media
files. There was a live copy in the secondary datacenter but for
example if due to a software issue, we lost some files, they were
gone. I would like to thank Jaime Crespo for pushing for it and
implementing the backups.
But I beat my drum again, it's not something you can fix overnight.
I'm sure people are monitoring this mailing list and are aware of
the problem.
[My goal in this post is to ficus effort and reduce frustration.]
Yes, people reading here are aware, and absolutely none of them expects
this (i.e. multimedia technical debt and missing features) to be fixed
overnight.
What's lacking, as you pointed out, is ownership of the problem. To own
the problem, one must have *both* technical understanding of the issues
*and* a mandate to devote resources to addressing them.
It is this *combination* that we don't have at the moment. Lots of
technical people are aware, and some of them quite willing to work
toward addressing the issues, but they are not empowered to set
priorities and commit resources for an effort of that scale, and the
problems, for the most part, don't easily lend themselves to volunteer
development.
It seems to me there are *very few* people who could change status quo,
not much more than a handful: the Foundation's executive leadership (in
its annual planning work, coming up this first quarter of 2022), and the
Board of Trustees.
Therefore, the greatest contribution the rest of us could make toward
seeing this work get resourced is to help make the case to the
executives (including the new CEO, just entering the role) with clear
and compelling illustrations of the *mission impact* of such investment.
In parallel, interested engineers and middle managers could help by
offering rough effort estimates for some components, a roadmap, an
overview of alternatives considered and a rationale for a recommended
approach, etc.
But this would all be preparatory and supporting work toward *a
resourcing decision* being made. So long as such a decision isn't made,
no significant work on this can happen.
Finally, while it is easy to agree that *this* is necessary and useful
on its own, to actual resource it in the coming annual plan it would be
necessary to argue that it is *more* useful and necessary than some
*other* work, itself also necessary and useful.
Another thing that may help is being explicit about just how important
this is, even literally saying things like "this would have far more
impact on our X goal than initiative A, B, or C", naming actual
resourced or potentially resourced things. It is sometimes difficult for
managers who aren't practicing Wikimedia volunteers to assess just how
necessary different necessary things are, from different community
perspectives.
And of course, one such opinion, or a handful, would not be a solid base
for resourcing decisions, so perhaps a large-scale ranking survey of
some sort would be helpful, as SJ implicitly suggested in the original post.
Cheers,
A.
(In my volunteer capacity)
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