Report on activities in the Toolhub project for the two weeks ending 2021-06-25.
See the on-wiki progress report [0] for additional details and clickable links.
== TL;DR ==
* Patrolling support
* Lists!
* Working out a timeline until the 1.0 deployment
== Timelines ==
(paraphrased from "Working out a timeline until the 1.0 deployment" on wiki)
Our July/August revised deployment target dates are coming up really,
really fast! We would ideally like to have Toolhub deployed by the
time that Wikimania 2021 starts. With that operational goal in mind,
2021-08-12 is the last day we could deploy and meet that goal.
Working backwards from that date, we need 2-3 weeks of feature freeze
for the Security review and at least a week for post-review
remediation. Let's call that 4 weeks to be safe. That puts our
"pencils down" date for 1.0 features at 2021-07-15 at the latest. That
gives us a bit less than 3 weeks to add the basic plumbing and display
for lists and clean up any other outstanding issues that can't be done
in parallel with the security review code freeze.
It seems reasonably possible that we can get the work we need done in
time to meet the desired launch. Ultimately however we will not be
"launching no matter what". If we end up needing a bit more time to
ensure that the community sees a stable, functional tool on the day we
announce it, we will take that time. No fancy launch announcement is
worth the loss of reputation that a new product takes when it fails to
meet basic user expectations on first use.
== Wrap up ==
The Foundation's fiscal year 2020/2021 comes to a close next week.
Back in April 2021 we announced our goals for the fourth quarter of
the fiscal year: content moderation, lists of tools, and annotations.
A few weeks ago we amended those goals to remove annotations. Our
hopes exceeded our reach, but we know that we will continue to work on
the Toolhub project in fiscal year 2021/2022 so the feature will be
added when we have the capacity to do so. As we get to the last few
weeks before the planned launch we will have to make more difficult
choices like this. That's a normal part of building a product. Good
ideas are easy to generate, but good implementations take more time.
I hope all of you following along can understand our explanations of
what is happening and why. If not, please do ask questions! We cannot
guarantee that you will agree with our analysis and decisions, but we
hope that we can at least show how we thought about the problems and
what motivated us to choose one option over another. :)
[0]: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Toolhub/Progress_reports/2021-06-25
Bryan
--
Bryan Davis Technical Engagement Wikimedia Foundation
Principal Software Engineer Boise, ID USA
[[m:User:BDavis_(WMF)]] irc: bd808
I am interested in submitting an "Intro to Toolhub" talk for
Wikimania. Srishti and I have a slide deck that we have been building
up, most recently presented during the Hackathon. Presentations by
Foundation staff on products at Wikimania have not however been the
easiest thing to get past the program selection committee however (for
good reason honestly).
I'm wondering if any of you fine non-Foundation staff folks would be
interested in working with Srishti and I on a proposal and
presentation that would be a bit less "the Foundation has arrived to
solve your problems" and a bit more "here's a interesting and complex
problem for the movement and an attempt to make some progress on
resolving it"?
Bryan
--
Bryan Davis Technical Engagement Wikimedia Foundation
Principal Software Engineer Boise, ID USA
[[m:User:BDavis_(WMF)]] irc: bd808
Report on activities in the Toolhub project for the week ending 2021-06-11.
See the on-wiki progress report [0] for additional details and clickable links.
== TL;DR ==
* Edit suppression UI
* RapiDoc upgraded
* Patrolling API
* Annotations will not be included in the 1.0 release
Annotations are a much desired feature to allow shared community
editing to be combined with the base maintainer controlled toolinfo
data for each registered tool. This feature however is also relatively
complex and in need of further detailed specification. We do not
believe that there is time remaining to even make a good faith attempt
at adding the core functionality in our current timebox. We have
instead decided to move this feature into a future release following
the initial 1.0 deployment.
We are very close to having all of the content moderation features in
place. We plan on implementing list of tools next, both for managing
"favorite" tools as a private list for each user as well as "public"
lists which can be seen by others. This work will very likely carry
over into the start of the next Wikimedia Foundation quarter. It will
also complete our revised 1.0 feature roadmap.
Next week is going to be great fun for those of us at the Foundation,
but less productive for the Toolhub project. The Foundation is holding
its first ever virtual All Hands event June 15 through June 17. These
3 days will be filled with many online activities to help us all
reconnect with each other and meet new folks. Bryan and Srishti are
not likely to be doing much coding at the same time however. Friday
June 18 will be an observed holiday for Foundation staff as well. As a
result, we will not be publishing a weekly wrap up on 2021-06-18 and
will instead resume publication on 2021-06-25.
[0]: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Toolhub/Progress_reports/2021-06-11
Bryan
--
Bryan Davis Technical Engagement Wikimedia Foundation
Principal Software Engineer Boise, ID USA
[[m:User:BDavis_(WMF)]] irc: bd808
Hey folks,
I have added Seve Kim to our mailing list today. Seve is a Technical
Product Manager at the Foundation. He will be joining our project
officially in July to help with research and new feature design for
Toolhub. I'm excited to have him working with us and hope that y'all
will help make him feel welcome. Seve has not had a lot of direct
experience yet in working with our technical contributor community and
the tools sub-community, but I have hopes that we can all help him out
as he learns about this interesting and complex ecosystem and the
folks who make it possible.
Everyone, please do remember that this list is a part of the Wikimedia
technical spaces and thus covered by the
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Code_of_Conduct>. The archives of the
list are also publicly available, so keep that in mind as well when
posting here. As long as we stick to the topic of the list, developing
Toohub, I think everyone will be fine. :)
Bryan
--
Bryan Davis Technical Engagement Wikimedia Foundation
Principal Software Engineer Boise, ID USA
[[m:User:BDavis_(WMF)]] irc: bd808
Report on activities in the Toolhub project for the 2 weeks ending 2021-06-04.
See the on-wiki progress report [0] for additional details and clickable links.
== TL;DR ==
* Special:Contributions and Special:RecentChanges workalikes
* Group membership management
* Edit suppression API
It feels like we came back from the long weekend in the middle of this
two week update with energy to dig into things and get the project
moving again. We tuned up some almost there patches and got them
merged. We also found answers to some questions of how things should
work that were hanging open before the break.
There is a lot of work remaining in our current roadmap. It is likely
that we will not get all the things we hoped for two months ago all
the way to {{Done}} before the end of June, but we will keep plugging
along and try to make good choices about which features to consider
critical and which we can keep in mind for later without risking the
value of the whole project. The recently completed internal planning
process for the Foundation's fiscal year 2021/2022 (July 2021 - June
2022) includes continued work and new planned features for Toolhub.
Knowing this is in many ways a relief for Bryan who had fears of the
'initial' release becoming the only release due to competing
priorities.
Bryan
--
Bryan Davis Technical Engagement Wikimedia Foundation
Principal Software Engineer Boise, ID USA
[[m:User:BDavis_(WMF)]] irc: bd808