For some months, Twitter have been blocking most URLs in their direct
messages (DMs), supposedly as an anti-spam measure.
Do we have someone who has a contact there, who could ask them to
whitelist Wikimedia project URLs in DMs?
--
Andy Mabbett
@pigsonthewing
http://pigsonthewing.org.uk
On Thu, Oct 9, 2014 at 10:26 AM, Pine W <wiki.pine(a)gmail.com> wrote:
> I'm sure a Board member, Lila, or Erik will correct me if I am mistaken,
> but my understanding is that there is internal agreement at Board level
> that the Product side of the org needs some systemic changes, that Lila was
> chosen with the goal of making those changes, and that some changes are
> already happening.
There's agreement at all levels that we want to continue down the path
set by Sue back in 2012 [1] for WMF to truly understand itself as a
technology and grantmaking organization. That path led to where we are
today:
1) As part of the ED transition, Sue recommended (and the Board
accepted the recommendation) to seek an ED with a strong
technology/product background, and we hired Lila Tretikov as Sue's
successor who matches those requirements.
2) In November 2012, I recommended that we prepare for building out
new functions for UX and Analytics, and prepare for dedicated
leadership for Engineering and Product. Sue accepted this
recommendation. I hired Directors for UX and Analytics in 2013,
followed by Community Engagement in 2014, and finally we hired a VP
Engineering last week to complete the process.
3) To better account for the need to learn quickly and adjust course
as appropriate, we introduced quarterly reviews in December 2012 [3]
and increasingly reduced the specificity of Annual Plan level
commitments while increasing the focus on metrics and accountability
in the reviews.
4) On the technology and product front, many improvements to process
and support infrastructure have been implemented in the last couple of
years, including but not limited to:
- Development of MediaWiki Vagrant as a standardized dev environment,
to reduce failure cases due to developer environment inconsistencies
- Improvements to continuous integration infrastructure for PHP unit
tests and QUnit JavaScript unit tests, and increased focus (but not
nearly enough yet) on automated tests, especially for newly developed
features
- Introduction and continued improvement of BetaLabs as a staging
environment for all commits, increased use of automated end-to-end
browser tests and QA testing by humans to catch bugs and regressions
prior to production rollouts
- Introduction and use of various tools for measuring the impact of
features, including EventLogging as a standard instrumentation
framework for measuring feature usage, dashboards for visualizing
usage, WikiMetrics for analyzing editor cohort behavior, Editor
Engagement Vital Signs for understanding system-wide user behavior,
analysis of pageview data using Hadoop (just rolled out), etc.
- Highly specialized automated testing frameworks for specific
projects, e.g. Parsoid round-trip testing and visual diffing (!) to
detect dirty diffs or output problems
- Introduction of design research as a discipline in the UX team
(through hiring of Abbey Ripstra as User Research Lead) and
incorporation of user studies in a much more systematic way across
products
- Community liaisons dedicated to key products, responding to user
feedback and helping Product Managers understand more complex
community needs
- Continued shortening of release/deployment cycles; significant
improvements to deployment tooling, rewriting our legacy "scap" tools
to increase the ability to monitor and reason about deployments;
introduction of daily "SWAT" deploys to quickly release fixes, etc.
- Introduction of various infrastructure tools that help us better
analyze/profile issues, including logstash for log analysis, increased
use of graphite for performance metrics collection and various
front-ends for visualizing those metrics
- Shift towards loosely coupled services, addressing the difficulty of
maintaining and improving our highly monolithic codebase (examples
include Parsoid, Citoid, Mathoid, and the new Content API in
development)
- Introduction of Beta Features framework to stage features for early adopters
5) The changes Lila has pushed for since we started include:
- Greater focus on quarterly prioritization and a "rolling roadmap"
rather than a fiscal year view of the world
- Increased emphasis on understanding the needs of different user
personas at all cycles of software development, including through use
of qualitative and quantitative methods
- Reducing velocity of user-facing changes (esp. on desktop) to
increase focus on foundations (platform/process improvements) that
ultimately will enable us to move faster and more effectively
- Documenting product development methodology on-wiki and establishing
a clearer social contract (to reduce the reliance on RFCs/votes
regarding feature configurations)
- Surveying the needs of current users to more systematically balance
projects that serve future/new users vs. projects that serve the users
we have today
- Improved communication channels for community engagement to make it
easier to understand what major projects are currently in development
and how to provide feedback
This already means, effectively, that the commitments in the Annual
Plan developed during Sue's time should be taken with a big block of
salt at this point in time -- we're slowing down the deployment (not
development) of big user-facing features like Flow and VE as much as
needed to ensure that we incorporate user feedback, data and
qualitative research into the product development process
appropriately and spend sufficient time on the technical foundations
for these projects.
The quarterly prioritization alone has been, IMO, a huge improvement
that's already paying off. In the "Annual Plan" view of the world,
it's unlikely that we would have prioritized a project like HHVM the
way we did, because we were generally stuck on the priorities set for
the whole year. But it was very clear that this project would provide
huge benefits to our users, and I'm glad we were able to call it out
as _the_ top priority for Q1 and give the team the space to really
focus on getting it done (almost there now, starting to serve reader
traffic [4]).
Our draft Q2 top priorities (not yet posted on-wiki, but discussed in
the metrics meeting last week) are consistent with the above, with the
main user-facing push being on mobile web/apps and editing
performance, while the other priorities are more
platform/process-related. Once again, we're continuing to work on VE /
Flow, but focusing more on fundamentals (performance, architecture,
testing, use case analysis, etc.) than accelerating deployments.
My focus over the coming days is to flesh out the details for the Q2
priorities, and then shift to putting more effort in documenting and
refining product development methodologies and processes on-wiki. On
the engineering side, there's plenty of process/infrastructure
improvement to do as well. From my point of view, continued
improvement to test coverage and CI/testing infrastructure, developer
tools, profiling/instrumentation, staged roll-out support and
strengthening of architectural leadership are the big pieces for
coming months, but I'll let Damon speak to his focus areas as he gets
the lay of the land.
Erik
[1] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Sue_Gardner/Narrowing_focus
[2] https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimedia-l/2012-November/122663.html
[3] https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimedia-l/2012-December/123088.html
[4] https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/165004/
--
Erik Möller
VP of Product & Strategy, Wikimedia Foundation
Hi folks,
to increase accountability and create more opportunities for course
corrections and resourcing adjustments as necessary, Sue's asked me
and Howie Fung to set up a quarterly project evaluation process,
starting with our highest priority initiatives. These are, according
to Sue's narrowing focus recommendations which were approved by the
Board [1]:
- Visual Editor
- Mobile (mobile contributions + Wikipedia Zero)
- Editor Engagement (also known as the E2 and E3 teams)
- Funds Dissemination Committe and expanded grant-making capacity
I'm proposing the following initial schedule:
January:
- Editor Engagement Experiments
February:
- Visual Editor
- Mobile (Contribs + Zero)
March:
- Editor Engagement Features (Echo, Flow projects)
- Funds Dissemination Committee
We’ll try doing this on the same day or adjacent to the monthly
metrics meetings [2], since the team(s) will give a presentation on
their recent progress, which will help set some context that would
otherwise need to be covered in the quarterly review itself. This will
also create open opportunities for feedback and questions.
My goal is to do this in a manner where even though the quarterly
review meetings themselves are internal, the outcomes are captured as
meeting minutes and shared publicly, which is why I'm starting this
discussion on a public list as well. I've created a wiki page here
which we can use to discuss the concept further:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Metrics_and_activities_meetings/Quarterly_r…
The internal review will, at minimum, include:
Sue Gardner
myself
Howie Fung
Team members and relevant director(s)
Designated minute-taker
So for example, for Visual Editor, the review team would be the Visual
Editor / Parsoid teams, Sue, me, Howie, Terry, and a minute-taker.
I imagine the structure of the review roughly as follows, with a
duration of about 2 1/2 hours divided into 25-30 minute blocks:
- Brief team intro and recap of team's activities through the quarter,
compared with goals
- Drill into goals and targets: Did we achieve what we said we would?
- Review of challenges, blockers and successes
- Discussion of proposed changes (e.g. resourcing, targets) and other
action items
- Buffer time, debriefing
Once again, the primary purpose of these reviews is to create improved
structures for internal accountability, escalation points in cases
where serious changes are necessary, and transparency to the world.
In addition to these priority initiatives, my recommendation would be
to conduct quarterly reviews for any activity that requires more than
a set amount of resources (people/dollars). These additional reviews
may however be conducted in a more lightweight manner and internally
to the departments. We’re slowly getting into that habit in
engineering.
As we pilot this process, the format of the high priority reviews can
help inform and support reviews across the organization.
Feedback and questions are appreciated.
All best,
Erik
[1] https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Vote:Narrowing_Focus
[2] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Metrics_and_activities_meetings
--
Erik Möller
VP of Engineering and Product Development, Wikimedia Foundation
Support Free Knowledge: https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate
Hi all,
There are online small business accounting software packages. Do any
thematic orgs have experience with them? Any recommendations? I am thinking
about proposing Quickbooks Online for the Cascadia user group, but as this
Forbes article says, there are competitors:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/quickerbettertech/2014/01/06/why-your-company-m…
Thanks,
Pine
Good news everyone,
Cheese articles are gonna get improved!
As french, it was dreadful for us to see so few illustrations of cheese on
Wikipedia. This is about to change.
A group of french Wikimedians, lead by Pierre-Yves Beaudouin, designed a
project to photograph many cheeses, up to 200 for the moment.
This project is perticular as we aim to have it found through a french
crowdfunding platform, KissKissBankBank.
Of course Wikimedia France could have funded it itself, but we wanted to
use the project as a way to get the larger audience aware of their ability
to contribute and to give a fun image of contributing.
The project in few words iss follow :
* 10 cheeses per session
* During the session the cheeses are photographed and their articles
improved
* During the sessions experimented wikimedian would train new editors
* At every session every participant would enjoy eating good cheese too
If you want to read more, or even contribute, about the project you can go
on KissKissBankBank : http://www.kisskissbankbank.com/fr/projects/wikicheese
If you have any questions, please feel free to shoot them on or off list.
All the best,
--
Christophe
Hi all --
Starting this month, WMF will be shifting its organization-wide
reports from a monthly to a quarterly cadence. This reflects our
growth as an organization, and is intended to make important
developments more visible internally and externally.
== Background ==
Shortly after Sue became WMF’s Executive Director, she started giving
updates to the Board of Trustees about her work. These reports were
compiled for accountability purposes, and not without some
trepidation, Sue started sharing them publicly in January 2008. [1]
The reports have grown in scope and depth alongside the organization.
Where we think we can do better is in the following areas:
- We've not defined the threshold for report-worthy work clearly
enough, so work that represents a few person hours’ effort could get
more space than a whole team’s work over the course of the quarter;
- We've not consistently mapped reporting against organizational priorities;
- We’re not presenting a strategic view on what we’re learning, where
we’re changing direction and why;
- We’re not helping users of the reports consistently discover
quarterly review minutes, slides and other materials related to a
specific area, in part due to the reports not being aligned with the
quarterly rhythm.
In addition, given the dependency on an increasing multitude of inputs
(from across an organization that had fewer than 20 staff when these
monthly reports were launched, and now has more than 200), the reports
have increasingly gotten backlogged, to the point that we’re just now
releasing the August report.
At the same time, under Lila the organization has shifted into a
recognizable quarterly rhythm. Priorities are defined quarterly, and
reviews are being introduced following the end of each quarter for all
significantly staffed projects.
== A New Reporting Process ==
It’s come time for us to revisit the model we use for reporting, to
clearly define the purpose/audience for these report, and to iterate
on the monthly format.
Purpose: The purpose of this report is accountability and learning
within the movement. The report is not a storytelling tool. Any
evaluation will be done with these objectives in mind.
Audience: Its audience is chiefly internal, including community
members, WMF staff, and interested donors/funders.
Format: Effective immediately, we are shifting to a quarterly
reporting format. This will impact our reporting, and the October
through December reporting period, in the following ways:
- Instead of three monthly reports for October, November, and
December, we will publish our first quarterly report in February 2015.
- We are reviewing the key organization-wide metrics and will improve
the selection and presentation of numbers at the top level of the
quarterly report.
- We will closely align quarterly reports with quarterly reviews, and
re-use high level findings from the quarterly reviews, while referring
to the slide decks and minutes from the reviews for details.
- We will aim to provide high-level synthesis and lessons learned, as
well as strategy updates, through this format as well.
Many of the more granular updates in the monthly report will no longer
be reported.
As above, the deadline for publication of the first report, covering
October 1 - December 31, is February 15. For this first report, we are
being conservative with regard to the deadline, as we will have our
resources directed at our staff all-hands and developer summit in
January.
Tilman and I will begin creating a draft structure for this new report
in coming weeks, and will do so in public from the get-go. We will
also rethink the “Wikimedia Highlights” alongside other multilingual
movements news formats, likely detaching them from reporting
functions.
Out of scope of this effort for now:
- Providing more timely updates on initiatives with high user impact.
We’re continuing to provide updates to Tech News [2] and similar
newsletters, but we’re not currently doing a major overhaul here.
- Replacing the monthly engineering report and its inputs, which also
serve as a project status dashboard. [3]
We are of course discussing how to improve on those mechanisms, and
feedback is welcome.
Let me know if you have any immediate questions or thoughts.
Thanks,
Erik
[1] https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimedia-l/2008-January/084883.html
[2] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Tech/News
[3] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Engineering/Dashboard
--
Erik Möller
VP of Product & Strategy, Wikimedia Foundation
Hi Lodewijk,
Currently IDEAL is temporarily down on our pages (it went into maintenance
mode after our annual campaign), but should be back up soon :) We know
the importance of this method for Dutch donors and have supported this
option since we started fundraising in the NL. We also support offline bank
transfer (IBAN) and donors can get the account number with our Donor
Services team.
We had an extremely successful Fundraising campaign this year, and there
will be some great mobile optimization coming up in the next few months,
which will allow mobile donors to complete their donations in a much faster
and easier way.
Thanks!
Pats
On Mon, Nov 17, 2014 at 11:28 AM, Lodewijk <lodewijk(a)effeietsanders.org>
wrote:
> A while back now, the chapters were no longer allowed to fundraise, because
> the Wikimedia Foundation argued they would be better able to do this. At
> the time, this sounded somewhat reasonable. However, since then, there have
> been some disturbing developments - at least for Dutch donors.
>
> No longer it is possible to pay electronically (iDEAL, one of the most
> common methods is no longer supported - 'electronic banking' simply refers
> you back to the credit card page) or even via regular bank transfer (using
> an IBAN) in the Netherlands. The donation page
> <
> https://donate.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:FundraiserLandingPag…
> >
> only
> allows credit card and paypal, and the 'other ways to give' simply sends
> you to the helpdesk if you want to make a bank transfer payment.
>
> What is the reasoning behind this? Have bank transfers become a legal
> swamp? Are there statistics suggesting that this method was no longer
> required by donors? Did the European bank account somehow get temporarily
> suspended?
>
> If it has become so hard to donate, maybe it makes more sense to send the
> donors to the local chapter pages where they can actually donate in the
> local suitable methods (in this case, Wikimedia Netherlands offers both
> iDEAL and IBAN
> <http://www.wikimedia.nl/pagina/doneren-aan-wikimedia-nederland>).
>
> One of the Dutch OTRS team members asked for elaboration, but didn't quite
> get a satisfying answer. I hope this is a temporary situation, and that
> this threshold will be removed again. It would be sad if we go through all
> kind of trouble to enable long tail methods like bitcoin, but skip bank
> transfer...
>
> Best,
>
> Lodewijk
> _______________________________________________
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> https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines
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--
Pats Pena | Sr. Manager, Global Operations
Wikimedia Foundation
office +1 (415) 839 6885 x6764
cell: +1 (415) 816 3349
fax: +1 (415) 284 9511
ppena(a)wikimedia.org
*Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in the
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