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