Hi Bryan
My main rationale for kicking the oAuth can down the road (i.e. pushing back on Erik) in the past has been the lack of PM to keep this focused, the lack of a clear UI strategy due in part to many people in our UX team being so new and our strategy being all over the map, and also because the team was clearly kinda done with this as a project for a while.
The situation is now different on all three fronts. With you taking the PM role very seriously, I feel comfortable that you'd be able to do the necessary user story work and pushing back on design astronautism (if that even becomes a problem). Our UX team has matured quite a bit since the last time we looked at this, and though OOjs UI is still new tech, I think we would get a little better support from our UI tools to make a conforming UI, and "conforming" is at least a little clearer than it was last year. We've all had some time away from the work now, and the experience which we've gained by having the current iteration out there a while can guide our future work.
So, this may be a good project to elevate. Those of you who caught Frank's talk at the last metrics meeting[1] will have a little better understanding why oAuth matters; it's a tool that lets other organizations build tools that interact in important ways with our site. The folks at
wikiedu.org are heavy oAuth users, which is why you'll see many requests coming from Sage Ross @
wikiedu.org in particular.
None of this is to say that this is the most important thing on the backlog, but merely to provoke fresh thinking on the topic.
Rob