After talking with both Arturo and Birgit about things we might present at Wikimania, I came up with this abstract for a talk:
Co-creating platforms and products: how the Wikimedia Cloud Services team works with the larger Wikimedia technical community to build and maintain Cloud VPS, Toolforge, Quarry, PAWS, and more
Did you know that volunteers are involved in planning, building, and maintaining the Cloud VPS and Toolforge projects as co-equals with paid staff from the Wikimedia Foundation? Since the start of the "Labs" project in 2011, one of the guiding principles for WMCS projects has been improving collaboration between Foundation staff and technical volunteers. Learn more about some of the policies and practices that are used to make this collaboration possible.
The submission would be under either the "governance" or "technology" tracks. I think it would work best as a panel discussion that is either "hybrid" (some folks in Singapore, some on-line) or pre-recorded video.
I think this is something that folks in the community might be interested in learning a bit about. I also think it would be interesting for those of us who have participated in this process to take some time to reflect on how we have worked together in the past and how we might like to see those those processes and practices evolve in the future. To make this talk work well there should be active voices from both the paid and volunteer staff involved. Towards that end, I'm mailing the cloud-admin@ list + 4 of you that I know have been active in the past in helping with Toolforge and/or Cloud VPS admin and features work to gauge your interest in participating. Thoughts?
Bryan