I am very glad to see this initiative.
A strong user involvement is and has always been critical for succesful developement and deployment of user oriented software
And here I see this now is set up in a structured way for the important work being done for WMF engineering work.
I am looking forward to follow the work of the new Director of Community Engagement and the community members groups he/she will cooperate with
Anders
Erik Moeller skrev 2013-12-13 08:40:
FYI :)
---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Erik Moeller erik@wikimedia.org Date: Thu, Dec 12, 2013 at 11:40 PM Subject: Update on community advocacy & liaison work To: All Wikimedia Foundation staff & contractors
Hi all,
As many of you know, we recently brought on board a team of community members to support the development and rollout of mission-critical WMF projects like VisualEditor and Flow. To-date, this work has been coordinated by Philippe Beaudette (reporting to James Forrester for this purpose), with the community liaisons maintaining a dotted-line reporting relationship to him while being hired by engineering/product. In addition, the Community Advocacy team has made available several of its staff members to work and partner on a day-to-day basis with the liaisons.
What we’ve learned so far includes:
- Community engagement continues to be critical for successful
development and deployment of products with a strong impact on community interactions. Not all products have such an impact -- e.g. improvements to the mobile reading experience or mobile apps don’t affect the experience of content authors directly nearly as much. In other cases (e.g. VisualEditor) the impact is huge and the coordination and communication requirements can be very significant.
- We need to start the process as early as possible - community
engagement isn't something that can just be done at the tail end to support a rollout. Liaison work includes on-wiki participation in discussions; organizing roundtables, IRC sessions, feedback and brainstorming pages, etc. The earlier, the better -- this helps surface likely points of contention, empowering Product Managers to better understand the high priority needs and wants from the community, as well as the cost of a change (how difficult will it be to make the change, and what negative side effects may it have?).
- Product Managers and Community Liaisons need to work closely
together and see each other as being on the same team. While a typical liaison likely will support multiple projects, just like designers, liaisons work best when they develop a deep understanding for the needs of one or two teams and are in active partnership with the relevant PM. The PM and Community Liaison should be collaborating on a day-to-day basis.
- There are other classes of community-related work that need to be
appropriately resourced, but are less directly relevant to product development. This includes: emergency and crisis management and response, support for policy-related RFCs, training for OTRS agents, organizing of visits of key functionaries and committees, etc.
- Learning the lessons from the existence of a Community Department,
we don't view "Community" as a function that can be owned, controlled or managed in a single department -- each department needs to be supported by community expertise in its day-to-day work, partnering closely with other team members.
Consistent with that, after careful discussion, we have decided to create a new leadership function, Director of Community Engagement (Product), reporting to me (as VP Product) and partnering closely with Howie and individual Product Managers. The Director of Community Engagement (Product) will be responsible for managing community liaisons (staff or contractors) who directly support product development.
Once this Director is hired and on-boarded, the Community Advocacy team currently reporting to Philippe will re-focus its energy on some of the aforementioned non-product matters. The community liaison team will at that point move to the new Director, and we will staff up as needed. We will still intersect on projects such as election support or policy implementation.
I’m not currently considering merging this group with the "Engineering Community Team" under Sumana Harihareswara’s leadership. That team is focused on engaging volunteer developers who contribute to MediaWiki, and while there is some overlap, I consider the goals and workflows to be pretty distinct. That said, I expect the two teams to work closely together in practice, with folks like Andre Klapper (Bug Wrangler) acting at the intersection between the two teams.
I want to thank Geoff, Philippe and the Community Advocacy team for all their support bootstrapping the liaison team and partnering with us on key product roll-outs, on very short notice. It’s been absolutely invaluable. I’m also grateful for the continuation of this partnership until we fill the new Director-level role, and for help in the interview and on-boarding process. Finally, thanks for all the hard work of the community liaisons on a day-to-day basis; no matter how hot things sometimes can get, we know that we can count on you. :-)
I expect to post the job by early January, and it will likely take us until at least March/April to fill the position.
Please let me know if you have any questions. :-)
Erik
-- Erik Möller VP of Engineering and Product Development, Wikimedia Foundation