Hi folks,
to increase accountability and create more opportunities for course
corrections and resourcing adjustments as necessary, Sue's asked me
and Howie Fung to set up a quarterly project evaluation process,
starting with our highest priority initiatives. These are, according
to Sue's narrowing focus recommendations which were approved by the
Board [1]:
- Visual Editor
- Mobile (mobile contributions + Wikipedia Zero)
- Editor Engagement (also known as the E2 and E3 teams)
- Funds Dissemination Committe and expanded grant-making capacity
I'm proposing the following initial schedule:
January:
- Editor Engagement Experiments
February:
- Visual Editor
- Mobile (Contribs + Zero)
March:
- Editor Engagement Features (Echo, Flow projects)
- Funds Dissemination Committee
We’ll try doing this on the same day or adjacent to the monthly
metrics meetings [2], since the team(s) will give a presentation on
their recent progress, which will help set some context that would
otherwise need to be covered in the quarterly review itself. This will
also create open opportunities for feedback and questions.
My goal is to do this in a manner where even though the quarterly
review meetings themselves are internal, the outcomes are captured as
meeting minutes and shared publicly, which is why I'm starting this
discussion on a public list as well. I've created a wiki page here
which we can use to discuss the concept further:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Metrics_and_activities_meetings/Quarterly_r…
The internal review will, at minimum, include:
Sue Gardner
myself
Howie Fung
Team members and relevant director(s)
Designated minute-taker
So for example, for Visual Editor, the review team would be the Visual
Editor / Parsoid teams, Sue, me, Howie, Terry, and a minute-taker.
I imagine the structure of the review roughly as follows, with a
duration of about 2 1/2 hours divided into 25-30 minute blocks:
- Brief team intro and recap of team's activities through the quarter,
compared with goals
- Drill into goals and targets: Did we achieve what we said we would?
- Review of challenges, blockers and successes
- Discussion of proposed changes (e.g. resourcing, targets) and other
action items
- Buffer time, debriefing
Once again, the primary purpose of these reviews is to create improved
structures for internal accountability, escalation points in cases
where serious changes are necessary, and transparency to the world.
In addition to these priority initiatives, my recommendation would be
to conduct quarterly reviews for any activity that requires more than
a set amount of resources (people/dollars). These additional reviews
may however be conducted in a more lightweight manner and internally
to the departments. We’re slowly getting into that habit in
engineering.
As we pilot this process, the format of the high priority reviews can
help inform and support reviews across the organization.
Feedback and questions are appreciated.
All best,
Erik
[1] https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Vote:Narrowing_Focus
[2] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Metrics_and_activities_meetings
--
Erik Möller
VP of Engineering and Product Development, Wikimedia Foundation
Support Free Knowledge: https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate
Hi all,
for those of you who do not watch the RecentChanges on the Foundation
wiki <https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Special:RecentChanges>, I
think it might be somehow surprising to see that in a top-level
decision, almost all volunteer administrators of the wiki have been
stripped off their adminship yesterday evening (UTC time).
As far as I know, community members have been helping out maintaining
this wiki for as long as 2006, spending countless hours of their free
time on categorising existing pages, importing translations from Meta,
and recently, deleting unnecessary and broken pages left over by WMF staff.
Apparently, this is something that not only isn't appreciated, but
unwelcome. Let me repeat that: the WMF does not wish volunteers to help
out with running their wiki, even if they have been helping out almost
since the very start of the wiki.
Some questions come to my mind right now:
1) Who made the decision to remove adminship from all community members?
(I'm assuming it was Gayle, but it could've be someone from the
Communications department for all we know.)
2) Why did you make this decision now? What changed?
3) Why did you decide to desysop people straight away instead of
discussing things with them first?
These are questions directed at the WMF—for you regular folks, I have a
riddle (I'll give a WikiLove barnstar to the first person to submit a
correct answer). There is /at least/ one community member who does not
hold any official position within the WMF, and who has not been
desysopped in yesterday's purge—do you know who this person is?
-- Tomasz
Hi everyone,
WMF researchers have agreed to participate in an office hour about WMF research projects and methodologies.
The currently scheduled participants are:
* Aaron Halfaker, Research Analyst (contractor)
* Jonathan Morgan, Research Strategist (contractor)
* Evan Rosen, Data Analytics Manager, Global Development
* Haitham Shammaa, Contribution Research Manager
* Dario Taraborelli, Senior Research Analyst, Strategy
We'll meet on IRC in #wikimedia-office on April 22 at 1800 UTC. Please join us.
Pine
Hi Everyone,
As mentioned after Sue's announcement of her intention to depart the Foundation we will try to ensure transparency in the work of the Transition Team where possible (and respect privacy where necessary). To that end I would like to draw you attention to a set of recent changes made to the Transition Team pages on Meta:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Executive_Director_Transition_Team
These changes include a preliminary timeline, FAQ and an invitation to add people to the "connectors list". Please feel free to add more questions and other discussion points. We expect to add more information (such as the choice we made with regards to the Search firm that will assist us) in the coming week.
Regards
Jan-Bart de Vreede
Chair Executive Director Transition Team
On Wed, Jul 24, 2013 at 9:11 AM, Nathan <nawrich(a)gmail.com> wrote:
> I think your anti-Americanism is misplaced. Let's look at some of the
> key people involved in the VisualEditor project. Erik is German, James
> F is British, Roan Kattouw is Dutch, Timo Tijhof is Dutch. If you were
> to skim the list of the engineering staff, they are extremely diverse,
> with many remote employees throughout Europe and a number of relocated
> Europeans (and others) working in San Francisco. So I think your
> implication that the VE is some element of arrogant American
> imperialism is false, and you should retract it so that others will
> continue to take your feedback seriously.
>
I don't agree with Romaine's view that it is a cultural problem, but it is
true that the WMF management seems to prefer to have all development
concentrated in SF. As you say: "a number of relocated Europeans (and
others) working in San Francisco." This concentration of resources in only
one place is not healthy.
And it has additional problems like finding technical staff at a reasonable
price there and having to relocate people from all over the world, when
some development centers could be open at other locations too, which might
be cheaper:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Wikimedia_budget#Development_centers_in…
Why is this not done? Wikidata is being developed that way, so it is
possible. Is there anything against repeating the experience?
Cheers,
Micru
Hi,
+1 to this question.
If we learn that there are items where we are invited to the MediaWiki and some estimates how many e.g. developerdays we would need to finance so we know it is possible.
However, we should mind that most of the chapters are not really development houses and we are lacking experience in this area.
michał.
28 lipca 2013 5:41 Craig Franklin <cfranklin(a)halonetwork.net> napisał(a):
>
> > Hi Erik (and whomever from WMDE),
>
> For the benefit of chapters that are interested in this space, can you
> offer any examples of projects that are of an appropriate size and type for
> a chapter to take on? I think that most chapters* would be willing to help
> out in the software development space if we got a bit of direction on how
> we could be the most useful.
>
> Cheers,
> Craig Franklin
>
> * Keeping in mind that my chapter probably wouldn't have the capacity to
> start anything in this space for at least another twelve months.
>
>
> On 27 July 2013 09:57, Erik Moeller <erik(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:
>
> > On Wed, Jul 24, 2013 at 2:39 PM, rupert THURNER
> > <rupert.thurner(a)gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > > If WMF is serious about letting development activities grow in other
> > > countries this might be taken into account in FDCs allocation policy.
> >
> > For my part, I'm happy to offer feedback to the FDC on plans related
> > to the development of engineering capacity in FDC-funded
> > organizations. I'm sure Wikimedia Germany, too, would be happy to
> > share its experiences growing the Wikidata development team. I'd love
> > to find ways to bootstrap more engineering capacity across the
> > movement, as so many of our shared challenges have a software
> > engineering component. If any folks on-list want to touch base on
> > these questions at Wikimania, drop me a note. :)
> >
> > Erik
> >
> > --
> > Erik Möller
> > VP of Engineering and Product Development, Wikimedia Foundation
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > Wikimedia-l mailing list
> > Wikimedia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
> > Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l,
> > <mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe>
> >
> _______________________________________________
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> Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, <mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe>
Hi,
I noticed that when I'm searching on Google, many Wikipedia results are in the form of lang-code.zero.wikipedia.org, perhaps just since a day or two ago.
I'm not sure what items are indexed this way, but it would really be a trouble - there is no link on the page that jumps you to the standard site (even the notice links to main page of m.wikipedia.org, not the corresponding article on m.wikipedia.org)
Regards,
Benjamin Chen / [[User:Bencmq]]
Heya folks :)
Denny and I will be doing another office hour for all things Wikidata
after Wikimania. Everyone is welcome to ask questions about Wikidata.
We'll be doing this on IRC in #wikimedia-office and start with a quick
update in the current state of Wikidata and its development. It'll be
on the 26th of August at 16:00 UTC. For your timezone see
http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/fixedtime.html?msg=Wikidata+office+ho…
Hope to see many of you there.
Cheers
Lydia
--
Lydia Pintscher - http://about.me/lydia.pintscher
Community Communications for Technical Projects
Wikimedia Deutschland e.V.
Obentrautstr. 72
10963 Berlin
www.wikimedia.de
Wikimedia Deutschland - Gesellschaft zur Förderung Freien Wissens e. V.
Eingetragen im Vereinsregister des Amtsgerichts Berlin-Charlottenburg
unter der Nummer 23855 Nz. Als gemeinnützig anerkannt durch das
Finanzamt für Körperschaften I Berlin, Steuernummer 27/681/51985.
The Berkman Center just came out with a report on the public
discussions surrounding the SOPA-PIPA actions; drawing on the Media
Cloud work by Yochai Benkler and others.
It provides context for the discussions on the English Wikipedia, and
captures the differences between the grassroots and top-down decisions
by different organizations and media channels who took part in the
blackout.
An interactive time-visual shows how the conversation was driven at
different times by different communities:
http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/research/mediacloud/2013/mapping_sopa_pipa/#
SJ
---------- Forwarded message ----------
Publication Release: July 25
Social Mobilization and the Networked Public Sphere: Mapping the
SOPA-PIPA Debate
Dear Friends and Colleagues,
The Berkman Center for Internet & Society is pleased to announce the
release of a new publication from the Media Cloud project, Social
Mobilization and the Networked Public Sphere: Mapping the SOPA-PIPA
Debate, authored by Yochai Benkler, Hal Roberts, Rob Faris, Alicia
Solow-Niederman, and Bruce Etling.
Social Mobilization and the Networked Public Sphere: Mapping the
SOPA-PIPA Debate
>From the abstract: In this paper, we use a new set of online research
tools to develop a detailed study of the public debate over proposed
legislation in the United States that was designed to give prosecutors
and copyright holders new tools to pursue suspected online copyright
violations. Our study applies a mixed-methods approach by combining
text and link analysis with human coding and informal interviews to
map the evolution of the controversy over time and to analyze the
mobilization, roles, and interactions of various actors.
This novel, data-driven perspective on the dynamics of the networked
public sphere supports an optimistic view of the potential for
networked democratic participation, and offers a view of a vibrant,
diverse, and decentralized networked public sphere that exhibited
broad participation, leveraged topical expertise, and focused public
sentiment to shape national public policy.
We also offer an interactive visualization that maps the evolution of
a public controversy by collecting time slices of thousands of
sources, then using link analysis to assess the progress of the debate
over time. We used the Media Cloud platform to depict media sources
(“nodes”, which appear as circles on the map with different colors
denoting different media types). This visualization tracks media
sources and their linkages within discrete time slices and allows
users to zoom into the controversy to see which entities are present
in the debate during a given period as well as who is linking to whom
at any point in time.
The authors wish to thank the Ford Foundation and the Open Society
Foundation for their generous support of this research and of the
development of the Media Cloud platform.
About Media Cloud
Media Cloud, a joint project of the Berkman Center for Internet &
Society at Harvard University and the Center for Civic Media at MIT,
is an open source, open data platform that allows researchers to
answer complex quantitative and qualitative questions about the
content of online media. Using Media Cloud, academic researchers,
journalism critics, and interested citizens can examine what media
sources cover which stories, what language different media outlets use
in conjunction with different stories, and how stories spread from one
media outlet to another. We encourage interested readers to explore
Media Cloud.
The Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University was
founded to explore cyberspace, share in its study, and help pioneer
its development. For more information, visit
http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/.