On 04/09/10 03:39, Aryeh Gregor wrote:
On Fri, Sep 3, 2010 at 1:20 AM, Tim Starling
<tstarling(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:
Your recommendations seem insensitive and
unrealistic. What works for
you does not necessarily work for everyone.
It works for many, many open-source projects.
I don't think you really know that. It's hard to see how much work
goes on behind closed doors when you only have a cursory involvement
with the project.
None of the open source projects I've been involved with fit the model
you describe. For instance, Squid makes heavy use of face-to-face
meetings, despite their geographically distributed development team.
PHP has projects developed by individuals and small groups which are
then reviewed on the mailing list.
Does Wikimedia want to
be among them, or does it want to be among the projects that are
open-source but have a stagnant community because they don't involve
volunteers enough and the code is tightly controlled by a sponsoring
organization? There are countless projects of both types -- both
strategies work, to a degree. Completely closed-source development
works too. Wikimedia is free to pick whichever model best fits its
needs and ideals.
I think that's a false dichotomy. For a start, control and design are
two different things, as the case of the collapsed interlanguage links
demostrates. Just because an individual or small group designs
something doesn't mean the community will accept it.
Design by individuals or small groups, with open community review and
consensus decision-making, is entirely consistent with a thriving
community. I'll grant that it's not be ideal, and that an open design
process should be encouraged where possible, but it's not a
contradiction as you seem to imply.
My goal as a developer is to support the community such as it is, not
to browbeat shy or otherwise sensitive developers into either posting
their comments in public or keeping their thoughts to themselves. And
my goal as a community leader is to seek consensus on all decisions
and to defuse conflict wherever possible by finding compromises. I
don't think these two things are contradictory.
I can say that despite being a nobody at Mozilla and
having gotten
only one (rather trivial) patch accepted, I feel like I'm taken more
seriously by most of their paid developers than by most of ours.
I'm sorry to hear that, and I'd like to know (off list) which paid
developers are making you feel that way. I've made it pretty clear to
Danese that I think you're one of our best volunteer developers, and
that you should be given whatever you ask for, which, I think it's
understood, includes respect. Maybe I can help to get that message to
filter down to the rest of the organisation.
I know more about what Mozilla is planning to do in
their next release
than what Wikimedia employees are planning. I've had lengthy
discussions on occasion with core Mozilla developers, and sometimes
I've gotten something changed because of it. I can say none of these
things about any Wikimedia project that's dominated by paid employees.
There are two projects which Wikimedia employees are working on for
the next core release: the resource loader and the new installer. Both
of them have been discussed on wikitech-l, and both have invited
community involvement by way of design documents published on
mediawiki.org. Both of them did their initial development in a branch,
which anyone was free to review and contribute to.
-- Tim Starling