Hi Brian,
That's a reasonable question. Both this consortium and the MediaWiki
Stakeholders' Group have the general aim of making things better for
"enterprise" users of MediaWiki, but beyond that the two have surprisingly
different goals and approaches. The MediaWiki Stakeholders' Group, or
MWStake, has a large number of goals, but a big part of it, as I
understand, is working with the Wikimedia Foundation and core MediaWiki
developers to make sure that the needs and desires of enterprise users are
taken into account. That sort of advocacy is not what the EMC is concerned
with. On the other hand, MWStake also does some coordination on volunteer
efforts at software improvement, so in that sense the two are more similar.
I'm not familiar with a corporate sponsorship thing for MWStake, but even
if that happens, the two are quite different in terms of their
decision-making approach. Anyone can join MWStake, and then decisions are
made (as I understand it) via discussion and consensus. With the EMC, you
have to pay to get in, and then there's a precise system of weighted voting
to allocate the funds.
It certainly could happen that the two organizations could coordinate, yes.
And some companies could end up being members of both. Nonetheless, I see
these as distinct organizations, and it seems like there's a need for both.
Thanks!
-Yaron
On Thu, May 25, 2017 at 12:25 PM, Brian Wolff <bawolff(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On Wednesday, May 24, 2017, Yaron Koren
<yaron(a)wikiworks.com> wrote:
Hi,
I'm very excited to announce the launch of the Enterprise MediaWiki
Consortium (EMC), an organization devoted to supporting and maintaining
"enterprise MediaWiki" software.
As you may know, a lot of open-source software has some sort of
organization or foundation that is intended to pool money from users of
the
software toward developers. MediaWiki is in an
unusual situation: it is
funded by the Wikimedia Foundation (and, to a lesser extent, Wikimedia
Deutschland and others), but those organizations' primary allegiance is
to
software that runs on Wikimedia sites. That
leaves a lot of
MediaWiki-related software (extensions, skins, etc.) that is mostly
intended for use on non-Wikimedia sites, i.e. "enterprise" uses: some of
this software has significant usage, but very little of it has
institutional support.
That is where the Enterprise MediaWiki Consortium fits in. It is intended
to fund the development of extensions and other software that otherwise
has
no funding source. The set of software being
funded is entirely up to the
membership of the EMC, and of course the amount of support that can be
provided depends on the amount of money that members contribute - an
amount
that will hopefully grow over time.
If you belong to an organization, company or website that makes use of
MediaWiki - and specifically, of MediaWiki-related software not used on
Wikimedia sites - please consider joining the Enterprise MediaWiki
Consortium - to provide much-needed support for the software you use, and
to have a greater say in shaping its future.
You can read more about the EMC here:
http://enterprisemediawikiconsortium.org/
-Yaron
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Out of curiosity, what is the relation between this group and
MWStakeholders group. Im given to understand that MWStake was also
considering having a corporate sponsership thing too (I may bemistaken on
that though). Do you envision the two groups working together, or do you
see them as being entirely separate and independent?
Best of luck in this new venture,
--
Brian
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