Firstly apologies if my mail was read as public discussions = bad. That was
not my intention. The fact I am on a vacation and writing emails on a phone
with a heavily bandaged hand (which hurts when i type) surely shows I care
a lot about this matter (and the fact that I am doing so on a phone might
account for it being worded badly). Thanks Steven for reading it as it was
intended.
The problem that I am seeing is that we have these discussions on talk
pages, countless mailing lists, Bugzilla, MediaWiki pages, gerrit commit
summaries ... where should decisions be recorded in such a way that they
can be found? We are obviously failing...
From my perspective the decision for this change was
communicated - at the
code level. See
https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/108155/ and
the code is
the first place someone should go to understand why something is happening.
As can be seen in the commit summary there was a meeting and this was the
outcome... (I was not in said meeting and your can see from the review that
I demanded to understand why said change was happening in an attempt to
help document this.)
Meetings imo are sometimes more effective than mailing list conversations
especially for any design related work and I don't think this needs to go
against the idea of an open community as long as output is recorded in some
form.
In this particular situation I ask all of you how could a better job in
communicating the dropping of free fonts have been done? What can we learn
from this to improve our communication?
On 16 Feb 2014 19:36, "Greg Grossmeier" <greg(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:
<quote name="Brian Wolff" date="2014-02-16" time="18:00:29
-0400">
> On Feb 16, 2014 2:04 PM, "Jon Robson" <jdlrobson(a)gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > Brad since you work for the for the foundation and seem to have a lot
of
> > expertise in this area and seem to have been
one of the more vocal
> > supporters of free fonts have you reached out to your work colleagues
over
> > video conferencing or similar to understand
the problems being hit and
> > helped them work through them? Email doesn't seem to have been an
> effective
> > method of communication in this situation as you have pointed out.
Maybe
> > you can help with documenting these issues
and helping people like
> yourself
> > understand the problems and why this change was reverted?
> >
>
> I've seen setiment like this (discuss in person, in hangout, or
otherwise
> privately) pop up recently (e.g on [1]). I think
attitudes like that
are a
> real problem. Supposedly we are an open
community. People should be
> entirely prepared to explain their reasoning for doing anything on a
public
> mailing list no matter if the request comes from
a wmf staffer like
Brad,
> or if it comes from somebody you have never heard
of before. In fact i
> would argue that the criteria and results of evaluations should be
public
on the wiki
from the get go, without anyone even asking for it.
See also: The general rule among many engineering departments at WMF is
"If it didn't happen on the list (or somewhere similarly public and
indexable) it didn't happen."
The team I most recently heard champion that rule was the Mobile Team.
Greg
--
| Greg Grossmeier GPG: B2FA 27B1 F7EB D327 6B8E |
| identi.ca: @greg A18D 1138 8E47 FAC8 1C7D |
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https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l On 16 Feb 2014 20:01,
"Steven Walling" <steven.walling(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On Sun, Feb 16, 2014 at 3:36 PM, Greg Grossmeier
<greg(a)wikimedia.org>
wrote:
See also: The general rule among many engineering
departments at WMF is
"If it didn't happen on the list (or somewhere similarly public and
indexable) it didn't happen."
Wikitech is great for discussing things with a wider audience especially
where we need to seek opinions of developers outside the staff. But most
decisions people make are documented on a wiki, Bugzilla, and/or their
preferred project management tool. A mailing list is quite bad at reaching
a consensus decision on something, as evidenced by the fact that we hold
RFCs on a wiki, and not here.
No one is suggesting that we should make all decisions via
teleconferencing. If you read Jon's comment with good faith, he obviously
wants to reach common ground with Brad on a contentious issue, and
suggested using a medium that is different than what we've tried already.
Brad has brought this up repeatedly on the list and Talk:Typography
Refresh, discussing this with both end users who disagreed and fellow staff
members. Little apparent progress has been made in reaching consensus.
Jon's trying to be respectful and reach common ground with a coworker. I
don't think anyone should be taken to task for such behavior, not when (as
you say) Jon's clearly been part of a team that has pushed for better
documentation of decisions than just in-office face to face meetings.
In short: mountain out of a mole hill. Don't assume people don't care about
public discussion because they want to have a 1-1 with someone whose
opinion they think is important.
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