20%, LevelUp and (I believe) whatever model comes after are victims of
collateral damage caused by a root problem: lack of time, lower priority.
Are we paid by the Wikimedia community to maintain an infrastructure and
deliver specific features at specific times? Or are we paid to build and
maintain an increasingly sustainable and empowered technical community?
The nicest aim is "both!" but our steps show that currently we are
assigned to deliver a service, and this is the main measure of our
success. The logical consequence is that the sustainability and
empowerment levels of our technical community suffer. The problems of
20% and LevelUp are just a symptom of that.
If we as a community really want to do both then we need to change
something deep in our plans. Our community metrics should matter as much
as our delivery deadlines, and trade-offs should be negotiated if one of
both gets into bad red numbers. Teams should plan for deliveries as much
as for community sustainability within their scope areas. The board and
the WMF executives should be ready to ask and understand metrics and
trade-offs in both sides.
Without this change we are likely to keep falling in the same trap:
setting plans and expectations that the daily stress will squash.
Employees unable to keep their "sustainability" goals and managers
unable to enforce them either because there is a deadline we must meet.
PS: I took the liberty to prune your analysis to show the backbone of
the problem:
On 04/13/2013 12:42 AM, Sumana Harihareswara wrote:
Problems/unmet needs:
b. Code review backlog. Per (a) this is keeping tech
contributors from
learning -- it's also important that it keeps improvements from reaching
users. And it's just dispiriting; the number of unresolved commits in
mediawiki/* has gone from ~360 to ~815 in the last 6 months[4][5], and
most of the "can we deploy this?" queues haven't moved in a few
months.[6][7]
c.
The plan for
LevelUp was that people's managers would check on progress. Thus
LevelUp in the most recent round did not lead to most participants
meeting their goals.
d.
Some feel as though they haven't been allotted the
time to do
any of this kind of work.
e. Related to (a) and (d), we have frustrating bottlenecks in our
capacity for some key engineering activities, *especially* user
experience design, community liaising, performance, front-end
(especially JS) coding and review, ResourceLoader, and operations work.
These affect everyone but hit volunteers disproportionately.
--
Quim Gil
Technical Contributor Coordinator @ Wikimedia Foundation
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Qgil