I agree a bit with both Kunal and Asaf here, I do not think our goal is to get it done **by paid WMF staff**, but it is also true that today that is the only viable alternative to get major technical work done. I do not think it is entirely fair to state that "status quo can be changed by just about anyone who is motivated to do so (...) just by doing the work". It is not a lack of motivation that hinders our movement technically, but a lack of resources and shared governance. I am not sure if the implication is that the movement should be expecting free (expensive) labor to fix these issues, but even then there is a very high bar for engagement with the technical community in order to have access and a significant bottleneck in both technical review of changes and engagement with technical and other communities for changes that impact them.
It is not only unfair to expect this to be solved by volunteer developers, it is not working. Why should we expect this will change? Open source and accepting volunteer contributions is nowhere near where our goal should be. We need better governance and distribution of resources and responsibilities to volunteer **and professional** organizations that can bridge the gaps in our technological stack. How we move from a state where WMF is doing all the technical development and deciding technical choices is a bigger issue. And perhaps it is in that issue that we will find an answer on how to improve the state of our tech ecosystem. How do we get from a WMF-centered development model to a decentralized one? It is a bit disappointing the lack of emphasis our movement placed in this discussion in our strategy process thus far; and how we have set aside the little that did make to the recommendations in this area since they were published. Chico Venancio Em ter., 11 de jan. de 2022 às 03:01, Kunal Mehta <lego...@debian.org> escreveu: > Hi, > > On 1/1/22 12:10, Asaf Bartov wrote: > > 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. > > If the goal is to get paid WMF staff to fix the issues, then you're > correct. However, I do not believe that as a solution is healthy > long-term. The WMF isn't perfect and I don't think it's desirable to > have a huge WMF that tries to do everything and has a monopoly on > technical prioritization. > > The technical stack must be co-owned by volunteers and paid staff from > different orgs at all levels. It's significantly more straightforward > now for trusted volunteers to get NDA/deployment access than it used to > be, there are dedicated training sessions, etc. > > Given that the multimedia stack is neglected and the WMF has given no > indication it intends to work on/fix the problem, we should be > recruiting people outside the WMF's paid staff who are interested in > working on this and give them the necessary access/mentorship to get it > done. Given the amount of work on e.g. T40010[1] to develop an > alternative SVG renderer, I'm sure those people exist. > > Take moving Thumbor to Buster[2] for example. That requires > forward-porting some Debian packages written Python, and then testing in > WMCS that there's no horrible regressions in newer imagemagick, librsvg, > etc. I'm always happy to mentor people w/r to Debian packaging (and have > done so in the past), and there are a decent amount of people in our > community who know Python, and likely others from the Commons community > who would be willing to help with testing and dealing with whatever > fallout. > > So I think the status quo can be changed by just about anyone who is > motivated to do so, not by trying to convince the WMF to change its > prioritization, but just by doing the work. We should be empowering > those people rather than continuing to further entrench a WMF technical > monopoly. > > [1] https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T40010 > [2] https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T216815 > > -- Legoktm > _______________________________________________ > Commons-l mailing list -- common...@lists.wikimedia.org > To unsubscribe send an email to commons-l-le...@lists.wikimedia.org >
_______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list -- wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe send an email to wikitech-l-le...@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/postorius/lists/wikitech-l.lists.wikimedia.org/
