Hi, On 10/6/22 07:38, Kate Chapman wrote:
I'm curious about the perception of TechCom being more community oriented than the new process. During the time I was responsible for facilitating TechCom it was entirely represented by Wikimedia Foundation staff, the exception being when Daniel Kinzler worked for Wikimedia Deutschland.
How many non-WMF/WMDE staff sent proposals through the TechCom RfC process? A bunch. How many have used TDF? 0.5 of a proposal maybe.
Yes, TechCom was composed of nearly entirely WMF staff, but that didn't matter. Anyone was invited to submit a proposal through the process, and usually it would get a public meeting/discussion with input on how to move it forwards. You could just show up and participate in a meeting if you were interested in that topic, you didn't need to agree to a 6-month long commitment.
On the flip side, here's the first sentence from the TDF wiki page: "The Wikimedia technical decision making process empowers teams to make decisions that are..."
It clearly states this is about empowering [WMF/WMDE] teams, not anyone else. That's a very different mission from what TechCom did. Don't get me wrong, TechCom had plenty of flaws, but I would not put transparency nor inclusion of community among them.
The idea behind the current representation is to make sure the right stakeholders are identified to help make a decision, not that the representatives are voting on a decision or anything like that.
This is not what has been said publicly. For example, "Some of us try to proxy vote for what we understand technical community including the poorly defined "third party" users are interested in..."[1]
Regarding the public TechCom meetings. There aren't a bunch of secret Technical Decision Forum meetings going on now that people aren't being invited to. Is the desire to have an IRC meeting at some point in the decision making process to gain input? Or are there other ways people think would be better for contributing?
It might not be meetings, and it might not be anyone's intention to be exclusionary, but there is definitely secret things going on.
For example, myself and at least 3 WMF staff members have been asking for information related to the "Authentication Experiments 2022" project to be made public and have been met with total silence[2]. I'm not really surprised anymore, this appears to be the default posture when it comes to literally anyone trying to get info from the TDF (see Zabe's email, or unanswered comments on Phabricator, etc.).
The TDF clearly has no teeth either, since people can just withdraw their proposals from the process after receiving objections and implement them anyways[3].
At this point I think we should stop trying to make the TDF a legitimate body and work on setting up a functional, inclusive and representative Technology Council.
[1] https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T293323#7485829 [2] Requests made in May (x2), July and September [3] https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T301724#7942826 Thanks, -- Kunal / Legoktm _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list -- [email protected] To unsubscribe send an email to [email protected] https://lists.wikimedia.org/postorius/lists/wikitech-l.lists.wikimedia.org/
