Last Friday we had a brown-bag presentation & discussion session at the WMF
San Francisco office with Brandon Harris showing the "Athena" skin design
mockups he's been building.
This effort is built around a "mobile-first" design direction that could
eventually combine with the main web UI to make a scalable universal
interface... in the short to medium term, we expect to use these designs
for the mobile web / mobile app UI, a great place to experiment where today
we have a blank state.
Mockup images & the ideas behind this design direction are on mediawiki.org,
please give feedback!
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Athena>
The full-size screen & video recording of the session is now on Commons
(1280x800, about 45 minutes, ~500 mb):
<
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Athena-brownbag-brandon-harris-2011…
>
and also a lower-resolution version which may play smoother inline
(640x400, ~115 mb):
<
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Athena-brownbag-brandon-harris-2011…
>
(Thanks to Roan for importing the oversize video files to Commons for me!)
If there's interest I'd love for us to do more of these kinds of sessions
showing things that we're working on "at the office" to keep everybody in
the loop and socialize ideas more during the early stages... we could
probably rig up real-time streaming so people not at the office can watch
live and participate (questions via IRC?).
-- brion vibber (brion @ wikimedia.org)
Lead Software Architect
Wikimedia Foundation
Congratulations to Sumana :-). May she bring many more women to (wiki-)tech.
Erik
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Sarah Stierch <sarah.stierch(a)gmail.com>
Date: Wed, Nov 9, 2011 at 6:06 AM
Subject: [Gendergap] Congratulations to WMF's Sumana Harihareswara!
To: Increasing female participation in Wikimedia projects
<gendergap(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
Cc: Sumana Harihareswara <sumanah(a)wikimedia.org>
Hi everyone,
I want to congratulate Sumana Harihareswara, Volunteer Development
Coordinator for the Wikimedia Foundation, on being chosen as
Femmeonomics "50 Women to Watch in Tech." She's listed alongside some
really amazing women - including Valerie Aurora who is a friend of
this mailing list and co-founder of the Ada Initiative.[1]
She's quite a voice within the community - encouraging developers and
programmers to get involved in Wikimedia and participating in
conferences like Open Source Bridge. On a personal note, Sumana has
been a beam of encouragement for me, and has helped me gain confidence
in regards to my "open source skills" and helping me learn more about
feminist and women's roles and organizations in the open source
community. She's also great to share a bottle of wine with.
Congratulations Sumana! We'll be watching (pressures on!)....
-Sarah
[1] Currently only the first ten are listed, but the rest are on the
way! http://femme-o-nomics.com/2011/10/the-50-women-to-watch-in-tech-the-first-1…
--
Sarah Stierch Consulting
Historical, cultural & artistic research & advising.
------------------------------------------------------
http://www.sarahstierch.com/
_______________________________________________
Gendergap mailing list
Gendergap(a)lists.wikimedia.org
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap
--
Erik Möller
VP of Engineering and Product Development, Wikimedia Foundation
Support Free Knowledge: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate
Hi All,
Please join me in welcoming Rob as a Software Developer contractor in WMF’s
Features Engineering team. Rob will be working on Editor Engagement
features, a top priority area on Wikimedia Foundation’s engineering project
list this year. He will be working closely with other team members - Ian
Baker, Brandon Harris, Benny Situ and senior product manager Howie Fung on
features that help improve editor retention.
Rob comes from a IT management background where he was lead developer as
well as managed web and IT services for hundreds of websites and email
systems. Some of Rob's latest work was extending open source web framework
Kohana where he created a web based system that certifies manufacturer
products based on technical specifications in compliance of an
international committee of health industry leaders. Recently, he worked
with a team of developers to create a cross platform mobile application
suite using PhoneGap for iOS, Android, BlackBerry, as well as porting this
app to native Symbian and Windows Phone 7 code. In addition to the mobile
apps, he developed a web based product search tool that matches and
compares DLNA certified products.
When Rob is not coding or planning his next project, he most likely can be
found with greasy hands working on some form of combustible engine. He is
a moped enthusiast and is an active member of a Portland, Oregon based
moped club known as Uphillbattle.
Say hello to Rob in person @WMFSF or online. He can be found on #mediawiki
as rmoen.
Great to have you on the features team, Rob!
--
Alolita Sharma
Director, Features Engineering
Wikimedia Foundation
Hi All,
Please join me in welcoming Benny as a Software Developer in WMF’s Features
Engineering team. Benny will be working on Editor Engagement features, a
top priority area on Wikimedia Foundation’s engineering project list this
year. He will be working closely with other team members - Ian Baker,
Brandon Harris, Rob Moen and senior product manager Howie Fung on building
impactful features that help change the curve to improve editor retention.
Benny Situ has been working with open source LAMP technologies since he
obtained his bachelors degree in Computer Science in 2004. Most recently he
helped build a large-scale automobile web application providing free
services to car consumers. He enjoys solving complex problems for fun and
has a strong passion to build applications that help people. Benny likes
reading and playing basketball in his spare time as well as discovering
good restaurants as a foodie.
Say hello to Benny in person in San Francisco or online. He can be found on
#mediawiki as bsitu.
Welcome Benny!
--
Alolita Sharma
Director, Features Engineering
Wikimedia Foundation
Hi everyone,
There's a ton of issues conflated in the SVN Extension access thread.
I'm sure there are things we can improve about that process, and I'll
talk to the people involved next week about it. I've asked Sumana not
to rush out a response on this thread today, and I ask that we table
non-license related issues until after Monday.
Now, on to the license issues:
On Fri, Nov 4, 2011 at 10:32 PM, Olivier Beaton
<olivier.beaton(a)gmail.com> wrote:
> There seems to have been concern with my original license, a
> BSD-2-Clause with copyright assignment so I don't lose the ability to
> distribute my code, this isn't the GPL, you need a contributor
> agreement with BSD (as I understand it).
Olivier, I'm sorry your access request didn't go the way you hoped,
but this issue alone is enough to torpedo your access request. I'm
generally sympathetic to the desire of commercial entities to have a
copyright assignment clause (as I've written about before[1]).
However, to the best of my knowledge, Wikimedia Foundation is not
about to dive into that thicket, and I'd personally be vehemently
opposed to us doing so.
As best I know, we don't have a stated policy for the license
conditions for code that is contributed to our source repository, but
we probably should. I'll take a stab at the previously unstated
policy now:
1. We have a strong preference for "GPL version 2 or later" (more on
this in a bit).
2. We generally accept licenses that are compatible with "GPL v2 or
greater". BSD 2 and 3 clause, MIT, LGPL, and many other licenses fall
into this category.
3. Don't mess with the license headers of code other people wrote
without their consent, because:
a) even in cases where it's legal (e.g. while it's perfectly legal to
slap a GPLv2 header on code that was previously under BSD), it's rude.
Don't do it.
b) it's frequently not legal. Don't "fix" someone's license if you
don't believe it is the proper license under this policy. Revert the
code instead.
4. GPLv3 usage is still largely an undecided matter, and we ask that
committers not use this license in any GPLv2+ licensed extension or in
core. I believe that some extensions may be checked in under this
license, but we're avoiding it for WMF-created work, simply because of
the one-way nature of the decision to move to it.
5. Anyone can contribute to anyone else's code under the stated
license for that code, with no other strings attached.
Don't take the above as gospel...that's just pretty much the set of
assumptions I've been operating under, and I suspect it's more-or-less
what others are operating under as well. We can have a debate right
here in this thread about whether this is the right policy to have,
but I'm not faulting anyone for making these assumptions. There may
also be extensions that don't adhere to this policy. If there are, we
should probably have a discussion about why that is, and what (if
anything) we should do about them.
On "GPL version 2 or later", what is meant by that is that the license
header explicitly say that the file is licensed as GPL "either version
2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.". Not
"choose whatever version of the GPL you want".
Olivier, I'm sorry this wasn't clearly communicated to you until now.
If having copyright assignment is a requirement for your extension, I
suggest you host your extension elsewhere.
Rob
[1] http://blog.robla.net/2010/thoughts-on-dual-licensing-and-contrib-agreement…
> "Carl (CBM)" <cbm.wikipedia at gmail.com> writes:
>
> > On Fri, Oct 21, 2011 at 12:15 PM, Mark A. Hershberger
> > <mhershberger at wikimedia.org> wrote:
> >> Posted this issue at <http://hexm.de/8m>.
> >
> > The above link is to :
> >
> > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_%28proposals%29#Does_Wi…
>
> As of this morning, I count 21 "support" and 25 "oppose".
>
> Part of the opposition was how I phrased it. Wikipedia obviously
> doesn't "need" a share button.
>
> I also didn't make it clear that I didn't think we should or would use
> any one else's "share" button since that would allow them to track their
> users through Wikipedia. As a result, I didn't count the one opposition
> that seemed primarily concerned with the tracking issue.
>
> Someone pointed to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:TheDJ/Sharebox and
> I tried it out, but it only worked after disabling the Firefox extension
> that I use to stop trackers. I'm glad TheDJ has made this available for
> those that want to use it, but I would like to get something else in
> place that doesn't share data with any intermediaries (such as
> AddThis.com) beyond the place that the user actually wants to share
> the page.
>
> Mark.
Making a share this link box is really trivial. There are several
implementations on different wikis (I wrote one at enwikinews -
http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Template:Social_bookmarks . Commons used
to have one with stockphoto.js. Not sure if they still use it, several
other wikis do their own thing) The issue has always been if people
actually want it, which I believe is one of those discussions that
comes up over and over again on enwikipedia.
-bawolff