Hi Asaf,
That's a good response, but I'm not sure it provides a practical way forward. How can volunteers bring this issue to the attention of the WMF leadership to get the allocation of the time of Wikimedia staff who can take ownership implement changes here?
Presumably emails on these lists have relatively little impact at the most senior levels, so they aren't a good way forward - and similarly on Phabricator.
The Wishlist provides a way of showcasing issues and a relatively clear way forward to get them implemented, but with really limited capacity.
How would a case for technical support be made apart from that? It's not clear if a simple survey would be sufficient. Would an RfC and discussion on meta help? Does it need the media to be involved to make it a public crisis? Or should it be proposed as a grant request, perhaps for a Wikimedia affiliate to implement? Or is there another avenue that could be persued? Bearing in mind that there's no practical way for community members to propose changes to the WMF annual plan for multiple years now.
Sorry to defocus things and express more frustration, but I think there should be a clear way forward with this type of issue, which isn't obvious right now. Personally, my hopes are on the Wishlist, although I'll be reposting a 14-year-old issue there for the fifth time when that process opens on the 10th January...
Thanks, Mike
On 1/1/22 20:10:43, Asaf Bartov wrote:
Writing in my volunteer capacity:
On Sat, 1 Jan 2022, 08:43 Amir Sarabadani <ladsgroup@gmail.com mailto:ladsgroup@gmail.com> wrote:
Honestly, the situation is more dire than you think. For example, until a couple months ago, we didn't have backups for the media files. There was a live copy in the secondary datacenter but for example if due to a software issue, we lost some files, they were gone. I would like to thank Jaime Crespo for pushing for it and implementing the backups. But I beat my drum again, it's not something you can fix overnight. I'm sure people are monitoring this mailing list and are aware of the problem.[My goal in this post is to ficus effort and reduce frustration.]
Yes, people reading here are aware, and absolutely none of them expects this (i.e. multimedia technical debt and missing features) to be fixed overnight.
What's lacking, as you pointed out, is ownership of the problem. To own the problem, one must have *both* technical understanding of the issues *and* a mandate to devote resources to addressing them.
It is this *combination* that we don't have at the moment. Lots of technical people are aware, and some of them quite willing to work toward addressing the issues, but they are not empowered to set priorities and commit resources for an effort of that scale, and the problems, for the most part, don't easily lend themselves to volunteer development.
It seems to me there are *very few* people who could change status quo, not much more than a handful: the Foundation's executive leadership (in its annual planning work, coming up this first quarter of 2022), and the Board of Trustees.
Therefore, the greatest contribution the rest of us could make toward seeing this work get resourced is to help make the case to the executives (including the new CEO, just entering the role) with clear and compelling illustrations of the *mission impact* of such investment. In parallel, interested engineers and middle managers could help by offering rough effort estimates for some components, a roadmap, an overview of alternatives considered and a rationale for a recommended approach, etc.
But this would all be preparatory and supporting work toward *a resourcing decision* being made. So long as such a decision isn't made, no significant work on this can happen.
Finally, while it is easy to agree that *this* is necessary and useful on its own, to actual resource it in the coming annual plan it would be necessary to argue that it is *more* useful and necessary than some *other* work, itself also necessary and useful.
Another thing that may help is being explicit about just how important this is, even literally saying things like "this would have far more impact on our X goal than initiative A, B, or C", naming actual resourced or potentially resourced things. It is sometimes difficult for managers who aren't practicing Wikimedia volunteers to assess just how necessary different necessary things are, from different community perspectives.
And of course, one such opinion, or a handful, would not be a solid base for resourcing decisions, so perhaps a large-scale ranking survey of some sort would be helpful, as SJ implicitly suggested in the original post.
Cheers,
A. (In my volunteer capacity)
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I see part of the problem is that the contributors experiencing the biggest impact arent the same contributors that have the technical skill sets to appropriately explain and understand the issues. Adding the the need to be able to make comparisons between other areas of need just makes its even more difficult. None of us want to be putting forward arguments that say that the WMF should neglect supporting Wikidata functions so that repairs can be made to Commons functions, this is a loss for everyone.
I know that the experience of the volunteers who spent 3 months in limbo trying to get the 2021 Wikimania videos converted and uploaded will feed back through to WMF hierarchy highlighting, but whether that taken has a priority needing to be fixed or bug to swatted is unknown. The underlying issue isnt so much that we need to fix software(though we do) as it is that we have structural problems in the way the WMF technical team interacts with each project. With that its ability to keep with the growth and maintenance necessary to function effectively.
The point I raised is that like many other aspects the software and technical support along with its communication channels havent effectively kept up with the needs of the community, not even the wishlist itself can keep up with it. This is why I said we need to pause and rethink the whole process, focus on clearing whats on the phabricator while we do so.
The frustration comes from being able to upload a video to the likes of youtube or vimeo in about 15-20 minutes, where as its takes 30 hours to convert to webm on proprietary software which I have to pay for and then 10-12 attempts over the space of a week or two to upload the video to commons. The available tools like Videoconvertor, and Video2Commons are so unstable that they dont survive the 30 hour conversion process.
On Sun, 2 Jan 2022 at 04:38, Mike Peel email@mikepeel.net wrote:
Hi Asaf,
That's a good response, but I'm not sure it provides a practical way forward. How can volunteers bring this issue to the attention of the WMF leadership to get the allocation of the time of Wikimedia staff who can take ownership implement changes here?
Presumably emails on these lists have relatively little impact at the most senior levels, so they aren't a good way forward - and similarly on Phabricator.
The Wishlist provides a way of showcasing issues and a relatively clear way forward to get them implemented, but with really limited capacity.
How would a case for technical support be made apart from that? It's not clear if a simple survey would be sufficient. Would an RfC and discussion on meta help? Does it need the media to be involved to make it a public crisis? Or should it be proposed as a grant request, perhaps for a Wikimedia affiliate to implement? Or is there another avenue that could be persued? Bearing in mind that there's no practical way for community members to propose changes to the WMF annual plan for multiple years now.
Sorry to defocus things and express more frustration, but I think there should be a clear way forward with this type of issue, which isn't obvious right now. Personally, my hopes are on the Wishlist, although I'll be reposting a 14-year-old issue there for the fifth time when that process opens on the 10th January...
Thanks, Mike
On 1/1/22 20:10:43, Asaf Bartov wrote:
Writing in my volunteer capacity:
On Sat, 1 Jan 2022, 08:43 Amir Sarabadani <ladsgroup@gmail.com mailto:ladsgroup@gmail.com> wrote:
Honestly, the situation is more dire than you think. For example, until a couple months ago, we didn't have backups for the media files. There was a live copy in the secondary datacenter but for example if due to a software issue, we lost some files, they were gone. I would like to thank Jaime Crespo for pushing for it and implementing the backups. But I beat my drum again, it's not something you can fix overnight. I'm sure people are monitoring this mailing list and are aware of the problem.[My goal in this post is to ficus effort and reduce frustration.]
Yes, people reading here are aware, and absolutely none of them expects this (i.e. multimedia technical debt and missing features) to be fixed overnight.
What's lacking, as you pointed out, is ownership of the problem. To own the problem, one must have *both* technical understanding of the issues *and* a mandate to devote resources to addressing them.
It is this *combination* that we don't have at the moment. Lots of technical people are aware, and some of them quite willing to work toward addressing the issues, but they are not empowered to set priorities and commit resources for an effort of that scale, and the problems, for the most part, don't easily lend themselves to volunteer development.
It seems to me there are *very few* people who could change status quo, not much more than a handful: the Foundation's executive leadership (in its annual planning work, coming up this first quarter of 2022), and the Board of Trustees.
Therefore, the greatest contribution the rest of us could make toward seeing this work get resourced is to help make the case to the executives (including the new CEO, just entering the role) with clear and compelling illustrations of the *mission impact* of such investment. In parallel, interested engineers and middle managers could help by offering rough effort estimates for some components, a roadmap, an overview of alternatives considered and a rationale for a recommended approach, etc.
But this would all be preparatory and supporting work toward *a resourcing decision* being made. So long as such a decision isn't made, no significant work on this can happen.
Finally, while it is easy to agree that *this* is necessary and useful on its own, to actual resource it in the coming annual plan it would be necessary to argue that it is *more* useful and necessary than some *other* work, itself also necessary and useful.
Another thing that may help is being explicit about just how important this is, even literally saying things like "this would have far more impact on our X goal than initiative A, B, or C", naming actual resourced or potentially resourced things. It is sometimes difficult for managers who aren't practicing Wikimedia volunteers to assess just how necessary different necessary things are, from different community perspectives.
And of course, one such opinion, or a handful, would not be a solid base for resourcing decisions, so perhaps a large-scale ranking survey of some sort would be helpful, as SJ implicitly suggested in the original
post.
Cheers,
A. (In my volunteer capacity)
Wikimedia-l mailing list -- wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org, guidelines
at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l
Public archives at
https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org/...
To unsubscribe send an email to wikimedia-l-leave@lists.wikimedia.org
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On 2022-01-01 21:37, Mike Peel wrote:
Hi Asaf,
That's a good response, but I'm not sure it provides a practical way forward. How can volunteers bring this issue to the attention of the WMF leadership to get the allocation of the time of Wikimedia staff who can take ownership implement changes here?
We have thousands of volunteers. And that's a problem. We wish that we had millions of volunteers.
Even with only thousands of volunteers, bringing more things "to the attention" of WMF leadership would be disasterous. The solution must lie in the opposite direction: solving issues without having to bring them to the attention of the top leadership.
This whole discussion reminds me of inefficiencies of the Soviet economy. How can central planning be so inefficient? If only Stalin or Brezhnev knew, he would put things straight, right? How can we bring more details to the Kremlin's attention?
The western, non-communist approach is to empower individuals to run enterprises without bringing everything to the attention of the top leadership. In a free market economy.
But a market economy for us, must mean that resources are allocated to those who are able to offer solutions that saves resources for other volunteers. How can we do this without paying actual money for the solutions? If your video upload costs you dozens of hours, and I can design a solution that saves your time, how can your saving benefit me? And after the new solution is in place, free for all, how will anybody know that it saves them dozens of hours? This is the big question that we should focus on answering.