On Tue, Jul 28, 2015 at 5:28 AM, Liam Wyatt liamwyatt@gmail.com wrote:

TL;DR - Objectively measurable criteria. Clear process. No surprises.

The context of my giving the example of Vector as a good example *of process* was after the presentation about the future of 'Flow' at Wikimania.[1] I highly recommend people read the slides of this session if you've not already - great stuff![2] In particular, I was talking about how the Usability Initiative team were the first to use an opt-in Beta process at the WMF. It was the use of iterative development, progressive rollout, and closed-loop feedback that made their work a successful *process*. I wasn't talking about the Vector skin per-se

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And I DO remember the process, and the significance that was attached to it by the team (which included Trevor Parscal), because in 2009 I interviewed the whole team in person for the Wikipedia Weekly podcast.[4]

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[4] Sorry - I can't find the file anymore though. This was the page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikipediaWeekly/Episode76

Liam, great response! You gave me a great excuse to weigh in with a little story of my own experience with the rollout, and a link to a video.

In 2010, I had long been an active Wikipedian, albeit never nearly as active as many of the more famous around here. However, I was a brand new contractor hoping to get hired by WMF. I was living in Seattle, and *frequently* flying down to San Francisco because WMF hadn't learned yet how to have anyone doing anything remotely management-related as a remote employee.

On my first(?) working trip to the San Francisco office, I got the chance to go to a talk given in at Xerox PARC by Tomasz Finc, Eugene Kim, and Trevor Parscal http://www.parc.com/event/1108/how-wikimedia-is-scaling-open-source-innovation.html. We all piled into Priyanka Dhanda's car, and she drove us down to Palo Alto.

I was very impressed with how WMF was thinking about it at the time. Maybe it was my rose-tinted glasses being a new guy, but I had spent enough time trying to make single-vendor, commercially-driven open source work http://www.oscon.com/oscon2008/public/schedule/detail/4400, that I was giddy to be working at a place where there was a significant and thriving community behind the development of the software. WMF had many problems with it's paid/unpaid developer relationship (see the "[Foundation-l] Community, collaboration, and cognitive biases" https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2010-June/059052.html thread started by Erik Möller and my participation in it https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2010-June/059097.html to see my thinking on it), but those problems were *interesting* in a way that I had gotten tired of dealing with in corporate open source.

At that time in general, many in the office practically seemed to have PTSD with respect to their community interactions. I can't blame them. We hadn't learned nearly as much as we know now about to speak publicly about what we're doing. We're clearly not perfect now, but we had a 5 years less experience, and a fraction of the people involved. Employees were *expected* to be as productive as their commercial counterparts, and communicate far more broadly about their daily activity, with far less structure and support from the organization.

That's not meant as a knock on the people that were employed here back then; they worked hard and heroically. It's also not a knock on the volunteers who worked (and continue to work) tirelessly to deal with the issues created in supporting such a huge set of sites without the tools. budget and day job available to their paid counterparts at commercial websites. We're all trying to do something really hard. There are lessons to be learned from commercial counterparts, but let's not beat ourselves up too badly for not coming out of the gate at their level.

I haven't gone back and watched it to see how impressed I am now, but Liam is almost certainly correct. There was some great thinking happening there, and in particular, I think Trevor's talk about the Vector rollout may be a good proxy for the interview that Liam is referring to. See the video for yourself: PARC Forum: How Wikimedia is scaling open source innovation http://www.parc.com/event/1108/how-wikimedia-is-scaling-open-source-innovation.html

Thanks for cc'ing me Jonathan, I wouldn't have seen this otherwise.

Note: I had to explicitly add Liam (again) on this response due to reply-to munging here. At the risk of thread hijacking, I suggest everyone tempted to lecture me about email handling read “Reply-To” Munging Still Considered Harmful. Really. https://woozle.org/~neale/papers/reply-to-still-harmful.html

Rob

p.s. Liam's other footnotes:

[1] https://wikimania2015.wikimedia.org/wiki/Submissions/User(s)_Talk(ing):_The_...

[2] https://wikimania2015.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:User(s)_Talk(ing)_-_Wikimania_... [3] https://blog.wikimedia.org/2010/05/13/a-new-look-for-wikipedia/