On Tue, 5 Aug 2014, at 20:48, Fæ wrote:
On 5 August 2014 11:33, Gryllida
<gryllida(a)fastmail.fm> wrote:
> Hi all.
>
> WMF Engineering is currently composed of individual teams as
documented at
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Engineering .
These teams look after the software that faces us everyday, and often work
together.
>
> Could we please have some more people (potentially a dedicated
‘community’
team) who could do these things:
> - encourage feedback by absolutely /anyone/
about the next features
they'd like,
> - run programming and documentation
activities requested (or started)
by community [there would be a lot of small
projects, unlike the big ones
the current Teams are working on],
> - encourage localising documentation for,
and centralising the
location of, all community-developed programming work,
> - raise awareness of community development
efforts across all
Wikimedia projects,
> - actively encourage members of community
become MediaWiki and Gadgets
hackers in the Free Software philosophy?
>
> This would be, in my view, a relatively small, collaboration-type team
(with
just half a handful of people for timezone coverage for IRC support).
>
> Open to brainstorming and suggestions. I would compile thoughts into a
wiki
page afterwards to continue thinking on the idea.
The roles you describe seem to have a lot of overlap with what we
might expect WMF volunteer coordinators / WMF community liaison
employees to be busy with. Compare with:
*
http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Job_openings/Volunteer_Development_Coor…
*
http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Job_openings/Community_Liaison
Do you intend this to be an unpaid team of volunteers doing these
tasks, or a end user group (in the Agile sense) that would be
supported by employees and may themselves be paid for some activities?
Fae
"Both please"? [This is a question! This is a brainstorming thread.]
Some part of such group of people could be paid (like the job openings you
linked), and a very vast part could be volunteer and supported by the said
employees (and documentation).
One thing to keep in mind is that English Wikipedia is only one of hundreds
of projects. The technology and engineering groups generally work at a
global level because they affect all projects; it's rare that they're doing
something for one project only.
There are lots of opportunities for community members to interact and to
test software in advance (the "beta" preferences are but one of them) - but
when discussing a global project or process or software, the best place to
discuss is rarely going to be a single page on a single non-global project.
Risker/Anne