Hello all,
The first topic of discussion I want to start is also the most awkward to start with - it is akin to the question “Can you all hear me?” at the beginning of a talk. The ones who already hear will obviously be happy, and the ones who don’t won’t have a chance to chime in.
What communication channels should we start with?
My thought would be that there is a need for three different channels:
* First and foremost, a channel to document decisions, essays, documents, plans, etc.
* Second, a channel for asynchronous discussion, announcements, etc.
* Third, a channel for synchronous discussion, for quick discussions, office hours, socialization, and later, when testing and deployment starts, for quick feedback
Let’s go through these.
First type of channel: persistent documentation and planning. Currently it is on Meta, but there are plenty of others that could be considered (criteria: Must enable translation):
* Stay on Meta
* MediaWiki.org
* WikiSpore
* Wikidata
* Start our own wiki right away
* A mix of the above
* Others?
Second type of channel: asynchronous, ephemeral discussions. Currently it is this mailing list, and a growing number of metawiki talkpages (thanks Chris Cooley for starting a discussion about this here!). Here I don’t see that many possible channels:
* A different existing mailing list
* A second new mailing list to focus on technical aspects
* Zulip
* dropping this channel in favor of the first and third type of channel
* Others?
Third channel: synchronous discussion. Currently, nothing is ‘blessed’ as such a channel, but there’s already a lively number of unofficial places that have been opened and discussed here (thanks ZI Jony!). As far as I can tell, there’s:
* #wikipedia-abstract on IRC
* #wikilambda on IRC
* Zulip
* AbstractWikipedia channel on Telegram is already quite lively
* Dropping this channel in favor of the first and second channel
* Others?
I have listed these options more with a goal of partial-completeness, not because I would be happy with all of them. Personally, I’d be so unhappy with e.g. blessing a Facebook group as the main official channel, so I have not included that. I am equally uneasy with a Telegram chat, but it’s also about going where the communities are - for example, my preference for the chat would be IRC, but I am a dinosaur.
Here are my thoughts:
* I would like to keep the number of channels small, so we don’t frizzle our energy out. That’s particularly important for the beginning.
* Any official channel may require additional Foundation approvals, but I don’t want to use resources evaluating all the possible channels beforehand if most of them are not of interest for us anyway.
* We should have permanent records of all official channels.
* All official channels should be under appropriate Terms of Services and Code of Conduct.
* Ideally, the community would coalesce and grow on official channels.
* Ideally, the channels we choose are aligned with our values.
No decision we make now is meant to be permanent, and as the project develops and the community grows, we expect to see this shift and change.
I am afraid that the main language for discussion in the beginning will be English. We will rely on community support to cover contributions in other languages as best as possible, but I am afraid it will not be possible to translate every discussion contribution and every essay. Sorry.
Besides these discussion channels, we will also have the usual stack of technologies supporting a Wikimedia development project: Phabricator for tasks, Git for version control, etc. For that, we’ll mostly follow Foundation best practices.
I am looking forward to hear from you,
Denny