"Proposing a solution to the community" should not be the start of the process of involving the community.
Developers are better qualified than non-developers to say whether a prom can be solved, and how it can be solved. But the most important steps in the process include deciding what could be improved or replaced, and crucially what priority various changes could have. Developers aren't necessarily the best people to decide that, sometimes their view is an outlier. For example someone took the decision that the Article Feedback Tool was a higherh. How many developers feel bitten when they have an edit conflict?
The first stage in the dialogue should be to discuss the coding philosophy. Currently we have some coders who believe that our mission is global, and that we need to support anyone who can get onto the internet; lets call that the EBay/Amazon/Facebook strategy. Others believe that our software should be the best that it could bewe are only going
Regards
Jonathan Cardy
>
> Message: 3
> Date: Fri, 22 Aug 2014 08:48:14 +0200
> From: Dariusz Jemielniak <darekj(a)alk.edu.pl>
> To: Wikimedia Mailing List <wikimedia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
> Subject: Re: [Wikimedia-l] Next steps regarding WMF<->community
> disputes about deployments
> Message-ID:
> <CADeSpGVbVTkhP61enKhyX5c-ESNCFOFtPX8f2Yv8nqG+jD2zGw(a)mail.gmail.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="UTF-8"
>
> one more general level solution would be having more steps: proposing a
> solution to the community (checking for support), inviting willing testers,
> after positive feedback introducing to all logged in users, and after
> positive feedback propagating on the site as a whole.
>
> Once the initial support for an idea is established, we can take for
> granted that the change should happen - but it should be up to feedback to
> see if the solution is ready, and not up to the developers' calendar (we've
> all seen what happens when the schedule is the in the case of visual editor
> premature launch).
>
> I think that WMF perhaps takes way too little use of our community as
> testers, commentators, supporters. If the community was more involved in
> development plans, it would also not be surprised by solutions which
> perhaps are important and wise in the log term, but still should not jump
> out of the box and be perceived as forced.
>
> I don't think it makes any sense to perceive WMF as just a servant. But how
> should we perceive the community? Is it a disorganized mass with no uniform
> voice, that should be shepherded into accepting solutions? Is it a valuable
> resource? Is it a full partner in planning, testing and implementing the
> solutions? I think that a lot of the latter is missing, and the fault is on
> both sides. But it is mainly up to WMF to change it, as WMF has the
> structures, staff, and resources to propose procedures there.
>
> just my two cents, anyway.
>
> dj "pundit"
>
>
> On Fri, Aug 22, 2014 at 7:54 AM, rupert THURNER <rupert.thurner(a)gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
>> Am 22.08.2014 04:18 schrieb "Erik Moeller" <erik(a)wikimedia.org>:
>>>
>>> On Wed, Aug 20, 2014 at 12:32 AM, Pine W <wiki.pine(a)gmail.com> wrote:
>>>> I am curious to hear your thoughts about the proposed Technology
>> Committee.
>>>> That idea has some community support and had been discussed at some
>> length
>>>> on the WMF Board Noticeboard.
>>>
