Meta comment: if our common goal is to increase collaboration, then we need
to excel ourselves in this collaboration precisely. If we minority of
tech-aware contributors are being confrontational between ourselves, then
we can only expect to nurture more confrontation than collaboration among
the new tech contributors we aim to engage.
So please, let's enjoy this conversation and let's help each other finding
better ideas to improve this problem we all want to solve.
On Wed, Aug 6, 2014 at 4:01 AM, svetlana <svetlana(a)fastmail.com.au> wrote:
On Wed, 6 Aug 2014, at 06:58, Quim Gil wrote:
> - encourage feedback by absolutely /anyone/
about the next features
they'd
like,
Betas and Bugzilla today. Phabricator should make it easier to provide
feedback in a wider range of topics, not only "bugs".
99% of users of Wikimedia projects don't /know/ about these tools. That's
the problem, and your response is not reflecting it.
Yes, I agree. Can we do better?
I think the core of the problem is how to increase the participation of
tech-curious contributors, and how to structure it in a way that informs,
influences, and actually joins the development process effectively.
How can we increase the participation in technical matters among Wikimedia
editors and readers? For some thoughts on this topic, see
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Wikimedia_technical_volunteer_outre…
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Project_talk:New_contributors#English_Wikipe…
Increasing participation by volume of participants is a goal per se.
However, this participation needs to be somewhat structured in order to
become efficient. For instance, having "more Tech Ambassadors" is good, but
wouldn't it be better if we all knew which Wikimedia projects and areas of
expertise are they covering?
I even think that having a sense of meritocracy among tech ambassadors
would be useful, just like it is useful at some point to know who is an
official maintainer of a repository, who has been granted permissions to
merge new code.
Am I referring to the Technology Committee that Pine is proposing? I don't
know. What I know is that tech meritocracy (and any meritocracy) works
better when it emerges from the grassroots, and therefore I'm skeptical
about any process that would start with a mandate from the Board or with a
WMF goal.
There are many smart, productive, and dedicated technical volunteers in our
community. In relation to the problems we are describing here, they have an
understanding, an experience, and a vision that most board members and WMF
employees can't match. I wonder what do they think, what would they do? And
I wonder how can the rest of us help them.
