Hi Tomasz,
thank you for your e-mail; we appreciate your time, your involvement and
your work on software issues critical (or just needed) to make Wiki
Loves Monuments better.
We understand the issues that made you abandon the 2012 WLM Android app,
and we're grateful for the effort that the whole mobile team put into it
last year. We are aware that the app might not have met your goals about
the number of unique uploaders, but it has still provided us with
valuable content and experience, and we hope it will also be the case
this year.
So, if I understand your e-mail correctly:
* (1) The mobile team is going to work on improving a generic
photo-taking application that has nothing to do with Wiki Loves
Monuments (directly);
* (2) You are going to work on implementing already existing
UploadCampaigns within the mobile app, which includes the creation of a
new Campaign: namespace using JSON (similar to the Schema: namespace on
Meta Wiki), which fixes bug 30645[1].
At the beginning of your e-mail, you wrote that you "wanted to use this
thread to collect our ideas". I'm not exactly sure what this means,
because what you wrote sounds to me like you're going to continue your
work as if Wiki Loves Monuments did not exist, not like if you really
wanted to collect opinions from us.
It so happens that the Foundation's annual plan for fiscal year 2013-14
has been released today, and I took some time to read it.
Unsurprisingly, Wiki Loves Monuments is mentioned there a couple of
times, just as it was mentioned in the AP for 2012-13 and in plenty of
WMF reports, interviews, blog posts and other PR materials during the
past year or two.
That said, I'm quite suprised to see how low on the Foundation's list of
priorities supporting Wiki Loves Monuments lies. Don't get me wrong: I
do appreciate the work put into the creation of the new Campaigns:
namespace (bug 30645 is truly horrible), the inclusion of
UploadCampaigns in the mobile app and all the other small changes to
come, most of which are linked from [2] -- but it doesn't change my
feeling on discovering that the Foundation's pet community project and
the source of hope among the ever-decreasing editor numbers so visible
on monthly charts is actually left without almost any organization support.
/Disclaimer:/ The views expressed in this e-mail are solely mine, and do
not necessarily reflect the views of the whole Wiki Loves Monuments
international team or other organizations with which I am or might be
associated.
== References ==
* [1]
https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=42164
* [2]
https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=42164
-- Tomasz