Hi, [Posting this from my personal address because I'm not subscribed to the list with my work account.] I've started a discussion on the technical Village pump on how to establish a better dialogue between editors and "tech people" (developers, Wikimedia engineers, etc.): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_%28technical%29#Improv… I'd love to get more comments and suggestions, so that the outcome isn't only representative of the subset of the community who reads VP/T. You can participate there or here on the list, I'll follow both. Also, feel free to advertise this discussions to fellow editors, particularly those whom you know to be interested in these issues. Thanks! Below is the text I've posted on VP/T: ------------------------------------------------------- Hi. I'm posting this as part of my job for the WMF, where I currently work on technical communications. As you'll probably agree, communication between Wikipedia contributors and "tech people" (primarily MediaWiki developers, but also designers and other engineers) hasn't always been ideal. In recent years, Wikimedia employees have made efforts to become more transparent, for example by writing monthly activity reports, by providing hubs listing current activities, and by maintaining "activity pages" for each significant activity. Furthermore, the yearly engineering goals for the WMF were developed publicly, and the more granular Roadmap is updated weekly. Now, that's all well and such, but what I'd rather like to discuss is how we can better engage in true collaboration and 2-way discussion, not just reports and announcements. It's easy to post a link to a new feature that's already been implemented, and tell users "Please provide feedback!". It's much more difficult to truly collaborate every step of the way, from the early planning to deployment. Some "big" tech projects are lucky enough to have Oliver Keyes who can spend a lot of time discussing with local wiki communities, basically incarnating this 2-way communication channel between users and developers. The $1 million question is: how do we scale up the Oliver? We want to be able to do this for dozens of engineering projects with hundreds of wikis, in many languages, and truly collaborate to build new features together. There are probably things in the way we do tech stuff (e.g. new software features and deployments) that drive you insane. You probably have lots of ideas about what the ideal situation should be, and how to get there: What can the developer community (staff and volunteers) do to get there? (in the short term, medium term, long term?) What can users do to get there? I certainly don't claim to have all the answers, and I can't do a proper job to improve things without your help. So please help me help make your lives easier, and speak up. This is intended to be a very open discussion. Unapologetic complaining is fine; suggestions are also welcome. Stock of ponies is limited. -- Guillaume Paumier [[m:User:guillom]] http://www.gpaumier.org