I'm trying to compare the feeling of the group (that we know exactly why we are here and how this aligns with the WMF mission) and my personal feeling (that we do whatever is asked and often the asks are questionable). I'm willing to admit that some of the difference in viewpoint is based on the particular work that I have done over the last year. I have been on loan to Multimedia, developed Wikimania Scholarships, on loan to Release Engineering and developed IEG grant review. In between and overlapping I worked briefly on the "DevOps sprint", setup logstash, rewrote scap and dabbled in HHVM related research. This level of bouncing around and number of solo projects has not given me a great feeling that I'm on a well scoped team. It actually makes me feel like I'm just a gun for hire (or worse monkey at a keyboard) to be called to service whenever and wherever RobLa and Erik feel an extra hand is needed. I'm not looking for pity or a "you're doing good job Bryan" out of this rant, I'm just trying to make my point of view clear. I've actually generally enjoyed the work that I've done here and have certainly had plenty of things to keep me busy and learning. I am however interested in acquiring a better model of what it is that I should be trying to do when I have the opportunity to choose work from the never ending list of things that could be done. I feel that this is important not just for me personally but for the team as a group when doing things like grooming our collective project backlog and defending our choices to management. I went to the wiki page for our group [0] and found this list of "responsibilities" for the MediaWiki Core team: * Manage the MediaWiki release cycle * Ensure that MediaWiki core is meeting the evolving needs of the website * Make quality MediaWiki releases available for others outside of the Wikimedia Foundation * Develop and document a clear set of APIs so that external developers can create applications that easily interface with MediaWiki This seems out of date to me. I think that the newly formed Release Engineering team is responsible for the first and third bullet points. That leaves "meeting the evolving needs of the website" and "develop and document a clear set of APIs" still on our plate. Neither of these seems like something that can be used to exclude much work from consideration. This can be seen as a good thing when the team is presenting their ideas outwardly, but it seems like a double edged sword for incoming work requests. It also feels like something is missing here. I really don't see any mention of our team's role in code review and stewardship of quality for MediaWiki and responsibility for security and performance considerations. I think it would be a worthwhile exercise to spend some time next week talking about what it is that we do here and what reasonable boundaries and expectations we would like to set with the Foundation and the community. [0]: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Platform_Engineering#MediaWiki_Core Bryan -- Bryan Davis Wikimedia Foundation <bd808(a)wikimedia.org> [[m:User:BDavis_(WMF)]] Sr Software Engineer Boise, ID USA irc: bd808 v:415.839.6885 x6855