2010/10/15 Aryeh Gregor <Simetrical+wikilist(a)gmail.com>om>:
The number one thing that
volunteers are unhappy about is non-deployment of volunteer code.
Why? Because the only reason for their participation is so that their
code should be deployed. When their code is neglected while other
people's code is deployed immediately, solely because those other
people happen to work for Wikimedia, that will result in a great deal
of frustration no matter what attitude anyone approaches it with. And
the solution is simple: Wikimedia has to allocate the resources to
deploy volunteer code continually, just like employee code. Which it
has, and that decision will have a much greater impact on the
staff-volunteer relationship than any change in attitude possibly
could.
+1
I whole-heartedly agree with the analysis that deploy backlog is at
the hear of this. I have some gut feelings I can't word very well
right now that say the "solely because they're not WMF" isn't
completely fair, but what you've stated multiple times in various
guises is true: what matters is perception, fair or not. If volunteers
*feel* ignored, that's bad. We can all go "oh but we're not really
ignoring /just/ you, we're ignoring others too!", that's not very
convincing.
We need to come up with a plan that takes us back to regular (weekly?)
deployments. I think cleaning up the CR backlog is an uncontroversial
first step. What I have in mind personally is to have this move to
regular deployments coincide with the 1.17 release, but that should be
discussed in a separate thread I guess.
Roan Kattouw (Catrope)