On Tue, Jun 8, 2010 at 6:31 PM, Erik Moeller erik@wikimedia.org wrote:
With all this in mind, here are just a few concrete ideas for closing the gap:
- Embedding teams funded by WMF into larger, publicly visible
workgroups which include volunteers and which meet regularly e.g. via IRC; 1 a) Outreach to grow and strengthen those workgroups with the best skills present in the Wikimedia volunteer community; 2) Publication of mini-projects which we identify and which can be tackled by self-organized volunteers, with mentoring by experienced WMF staff and volunteers (happening a bit via GSoC, but not as much outside of it yet); 3) Making development roadmaps fully transparent and open to discussion, and sharing justifications for all key priorities; 4) Further iteration of tools and processes for rapid volunteer-driven bug reporting, cross-browser testing, and submission of simple patches; 5) Stimulating larger scale contests focusing on specific areas of interest; 6) More topic-focused meetings and sprints like the multimedia usability meeting in Paris. 7) Further experimentation with tools like IdeaTorrent for large-scale brainstorming and ranking purposes (we have a prototype running at http://prototype.wikimedia.org/en-idea/ideatorrent/ ).
None of these strike me as essential for a successful bazaar-style development model, except (4). I'd say some of the most important things are (from a development point of view, not talking about non-developer communities)
1) Rely on public mailing lists for communication as much as possible, supplemented by IRC channels (preferably publicly logged). Private e-mail, face-to-face meetings, and telephone meetings are impossible for volunteers to join in on, so they should be used as little as possible. Don't try to move everyone to San Francisco -- if you do that, they'll inevitably rely heavily on face-to-face communication and lock out volunteers. I get the impression this has happened with the usability team.
2) Make sure that every paid developer spends time dealing with the community. This can include giving support to end users, discussing things with volunteers, reviewing patches, etc. They should be doing this on paid time, and they should be discussing their personal opinions without consulting with anyone else (i.e., not summarizing official positions). Paid developers and volunteers have to get to know each other and have to be able to discuss MediaWiki together.
3) Don't needlessly fork discussion fora. The Usability Initiative made its own public wiki, IRC chat, etc., and those are used overwhelmingly by paid people. This might not have happened if they stuck to existing, established fora like wikitech-l, #mediawiki, and mediawiki.org, where there are already a lot of community members reading.
The basic attitude has to be that paid developers are treated identically to volunteers, except that you can tell the former what to do and expect them to put in more time. There should not be communication between paid developers and the community, paid developers should be an integral *part* of the community rather than a separate group of people.