Hi all,
There are online small business accounting software packages. Do any
thematic orgs have experience with them? Any recommendations? I am thinking
about proposing Quickbooks Online for the Cascadia user group, but as this
Forbes article says, there are competitors:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/quickerbettertech/2014/01/06/why-your-company-m…
Thanks,
Pine
Hi folks,
At the Zurich Hackathon, I met with a couple of folks from WM-CH who
were interested in talking about ways that chapters can get involved
in engineering/product development, similar to WM-DE's work on
Wikidata.
My recommendation to them was to consider working on GLAM-related
tooling. This includes helping improve some of the reporting tools
currently running in Labs (primarily developed by the illustrious and
wonderful Magnus Manske in his spare time), but also meeting other
requirements identified by the GLAM community [1] and potentially
helping with the development of more complex MediaWiki-integrated
tools like the GLAMWiki-Toolset.
There's work that only WMF is well positioned to do (like feeding all
media view data into Hadoop and providing generalized reports and
APIs), but a lot of work in the aforementioned categories could be
done by any chapter and could easily be scaled up from 1 to 2 to 3
FTEs and beyond as warranted. That's because a lot of the tools are
separate from MediaWiki, so code review and integration requirements
are lower, and it's easier for technically proficient folks to help.
In short, I think this could provide a nice on-ramp for a chapter or
chapters to support the work of volunteers in the cultural sector with
appropriate technology. This availability of appropriate technology is
clearly increasingly a distinguishing factor for Wikimedia relative to
more commercial offerings in its appeal to the cultural sector.
At the same time, WMF itself doesn't currently prioritize work with
the cultural sector very highly, which I think is appropriate given
all the other problems we have to solve. So if this kind of work has
to compete for attention with much more basic improvements to say the
uploading pipeline or the editing tools, it's going to lose. Therefore
I think having a "cultural tooling" team or teams in the larger
movement would be appropriate.
I've not heard back from WM-CH yet on this, but I also don't think
it's an exclusive suggestion, so wanted to put the idea in people's
heads in case other organizations in the movement want to help with
it. I do want WMF to solve the larger infrastructure problems, but the
more specialized tooling is likely _not_ going to be high on our
agenda anytime soon.
Thanks,
Erik
[1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a2/Report_on_requirements_…
--
Erik Möller
VP of Engineering and Product Development, Wikimedia Foundation
On Fri, Jul 11, 2014 at 10:37 AM, Andy Mabbett
<andy(a)pigsonthewing.org.uk> wrote:
> It's interesting to read that claim in the content of my "aversion" to
> the unexpected removal of the very useful 'nearby' feature from the
> Android app [1].
(...)
> [1] Promoted by the WMF at the time of its launch:
> http://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/05/29/wikipedia-nearby-beta/ and widely
> reported in the press.
Apologies for the thread-split, but this is OT from the original thread.
This blog post actually referred to the Mobile Web, where the feature
continues to be available (without a map view):
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Nearby
The new Android app isn't simply an upgrade of the last version, it's
a complete re-write in native code -- one which by all accounts has
been extremely well received. In determining the feature set, the team
looked at core functionality they really wanted to deliver in the
first release, and iterated on that based on user feedback during the
beta.
We are in the lucky position to now have a team of three full-time
developers working on the app to make it continually better. You can
see the most recent code changes here:
https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/q/apps/android,n,z
And a more understandable view of the current sprint in Trello:
https://trello.com/b/5DhKhjmW/mobile-app-sprint-35-article-usability-enhanc…
So you can expect a pretty fast pace of change.
The team prioritized features that were highly requested and popular
among users. The "nearby" feature in the old app also relied on third
party infrastructure, which makes us a bit uncomfortable from a user
privacy and principles perspective. Our plan is to build out our own
OpenStreetMap infrastructure later this year which will help in
further developing such geo-functionality.
CCing Dan (PM for Apps) in case he wants to weigh in on the roadmap.
Erik
--
Erik Möller
VP of Engineering and Product Development, Wikimedia Foundation
Hi folks,
I'd be interested in hearing broader community opinions about the
extent to which WMF should sponsor non-profits purely to support work
that Wikimedia benefits from, even if it's not directed towards a
specific goal established in a grant agreement.
This comes up from time to time. One of the few historic precedents
I'm aware of is the $5,000 donation that WMF made to FreeNode in 2006
[1]. But there are of course many other organizations/communities that
the Wikimedia movement is indebted to.
On the software side, we have Ubuntu Linux (itself highly indebted to
Debian) / Apache / MariaDB / PHP / Varnish / ElasticSearch / memcached
/ Puppet / OpenStack / various libraries and many other dependencies [2],
infrastructure tools like ganglia, observium, icinga, etc. Some of
these projects have nonprofits that accept and seek sponsorship and
support, some don't.
One could easily expand well beyond the software we depend on
server-side to client-side open source applications used by our
community to create content: stuff like Inkscape, GIMP and LibreOffice
(used for diagrams). And there are other communities we depend on,
like OpenStreetMap.
So, should we steer clear of this type of sponsorship altogether
because it's a slippery slope, or should we try to come up with
evaluation criteria to consider it on a case-by-case basis (e.g. is
there a trustworthy non-profit that has a track record of
accomplishment and is in actual need of financial support)?
I could imagine a process with a fixed "giving back" annual budget
and a community nominations/review workflow. It'd be work to create
and I don't want to commit to that yet, but I would be interested to
hear opinions.
MariaDB specifically invited WMF to become a sponsor, and we're
clearly highly dependent on them. But I don't think it makes sense for
us to just write checks if there's someone who asks for support and
there's a justifiable need. However, if there's broad agreement that
this is something Wikimedia should do more of, then I think it's worth
developing more consistent sponsorship criteria.
Thanks,
Erik
[1] https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Resolution:Freenode_Donation
[2] Cf. https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Upstream_projects
--
Erik Möller
VP of Engineering and Product Development, Wikimedia Foundation
MZMcBride, I agree with you, but let me split out one thing:
On 20 August 2014 04:09, MZMcBride wrote:
> the one complaint I _never_ hear is that
> Wikipedia has a readership problem.
Then you'll hear it from me.
First, let's make one thing clear: the reader doesn't exist; it's just a
rhetorical trick, and a very dangerous one. For more:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Stupidity_of_the_reader
Page views, however brute a concept, exist; and I think they're telling
us we do have a readership problem. For it.wiki, in the last year I see
a suspiciously similar decrease in desktop pageviews and editing
activity (possibly around –20 %). It would *seem* that every user
converted to the mobile site is a step towards extinction of the wiki.
Long story:
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:The_sudden_decline_of_Italian_Wiki…>
The page above is just a collection of pointers that I probably won't
be able to pursue in the coming months, to study an unprecedented
collapse of editing activity and active editors on it.wiki. However,
there /are/ several things worth looking into and we do have a huge
problem (or several).
Can anything be done about it? I don't know. In its brief history, WMF
software development has always been irrelevant for the increase of
editing activity and reach. Let's hope for a counterexample.
Nemo
P.s.: Yes, this message is focused on one small thing only. That's just
about what we are/were already doing, while most opportunities lie in
what we're not doing, see the sister projects and [[strategy:List of
things that need to be free]]; we like to think otherwise, but our free
culture projects are still very marginal.
I wrote the email below to Lila and the WMF Legal department asking
for access to records (and reports) they hold on me, but I'm sad to
say that after 3 weeks waiting, I have yet to receive an
acknowledgement. As a Wikimania London volunteer I had a moment to
speak with Jan-Bart, and some of my Wikimedia Commons uploads were
even featured as part of a presentation by WMF Legal on their
successes in the past year, so there was plenty of opportunity for us
to have the friendly chat I suggested.
Can someone recommend if there is a WMF policy on transparency that
volunteers can rely on for questions like mine, or does the law in the
USA give me any specific rights of access to records or reports the
WMF may keep on me that would mean that WMF Legal would do more than
stay silent in response to reasonable requests from its established
volunteers?
Thanks,
Fae
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Fæ <faewik(a)gmail.com>
Date: Sun, 3 Aug 2014 13:49:45 +0100
Subject: Request for disclosure of all WMF records relating to Fae
To: Lila Tretikov <lila(a)wikimedia.org>
Cc: legal <legal(a)wikimedia.org>, Jan-Bart de Vreede <jdevreede(a)wikimedia.org>
Dear Lila,
The Wikimedia Foundation keeps information such as management
summaries about me, which have never been shared with me.
[Redacted example material]
Could you please ensure that all records that the WMF has retained
about me are copied to me? It would seem fair that I have the
opportunity to both understand what the WMF management and board have
available to refer to when discussing my activities for Wikimedia, and
that I have a chance to both correct any mistakes in this personal
data, or to ask that inappropriate material gets permanently removed
from WMF databases.
I will be active in both the Wikimania hackerthon and conference in
the coming week, should you or an employee wish to informally review
this request with me in person, along with my reasons for making the
request at this time.
...
--
faewik(a)gmail.com https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Fae
Dear all,
The next WMF metrics and activities meeting will take place on Thursday,
September 4, 2014 at 6 PM UTC (11 AM PDT). The IRC channel is
#wikimedia-office on irc.freenode.net and the meeting will be broadcast as
a live YouTube stream.
The current structure of the meeting is:
* Welcoming recent hires
* Update and Q&A with the Executive Director, if available
* Review of key metrics including the monthly report card, but also
specialized reports and analytic
* Review of financials
* Brief presentations on recent projects, with a focus on highest priority
initiatives
Please review
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Metrics_and_activities_meetings for further
information about how to participate.
We’ll post the video recording publicly after the meeting.
Thank you,
Praveena
--
Praveena Maharaj
Executive Assistant to the VP of Engineering & Product Development
Wikimedia Foundation
Is there a list somewhere of all currently active Foundation
initiatives for attracting and retaining active editors? I am only
aware of the one project, "Task Recommendations," to try to encourage
editors who have made a few edits to make more, described starting at
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2JbZ1uWoKEg&t=60m20s
I am not worried about pageviews at all, given that the trend is as
constant as it has ever been when mobile users are added in to the
total. Sadly, the greater number of mobile users appears to be harming
active editor numbers beyond their already dismal trend, so it would
be nice to have an idea of exactly how much effort the Foundation is
applying to its only strategic goal which it is not achieved, and has
not ever achieved. I am amazed that so much more effort continues to
be applied to the other goals, all of which have always been met
through to the present. What does this state of affairs say about the
Foundation leadership's ability to prioritize?
Is there any evidence at all that anyone in the Foundation is
interested in any kind of change which would make non-editors more
inclined to edit, or empower editors with social factors which might
provide more time, economic power, or other means to enable them to
edit more?
Ever thought of seeing your own photos on Wikipedia ?
This is your chance to take part in our annual photography competition to improve Wikipedia. The encyclopaedia is visited by 500 million people every month, and needs you to help improve its photos.
Wiki Loves Monuments UK is aimed at the UK's listed buildings and ancient monuments, and starts on Monday 1st September. The contest is supported by the Royal Photographic Society, English Heritage, and Wikimedia UK.
We've got lots of pictures of Tower Bridge and Stonehenge, but there's so much more of the country's heritage to celebrate. There are tens of thousands of eligible sites, so check out the UK competition website (http://www.wikilovesmonuments.org.uk) and see what's nearby. As well as prizes for the best image, we have a special prize this year for the best image of a listed building on one of the 'At Risk' registers.
It doesn't matter when your photos are taken so long as they're uploaded by the end of September. If you took some stunning pictures back in April, or five years ago, you can still upload them.
To enter, you'll need to agree to release your entries under a free licence allowing them to be freely used by anyone for any purpose, including Wikipedia. You retain copyright, and can require anyone using your images to attribute them to you as photographer.
Help us show off your local history!
Michael
___
Michael Maggs
Wiki Loves Monuments volunteer