Hi everybody,
We have made some changes to our Product and Technology departments which we are excited to tell you about. When Wes Moran, former Vice President of Product, left the Wikimedia Foundation in May, we took the opportunity to review the organization and operating principles that were guiding Product and Technology. Our objectives were to improve our engagement with the community during product development, develop a more audience-based approach to building products, and create as efficient a pipeline as possible between an idea and its deployment. We also wanted an approach that would better prepare our engineering teams to plan around the upcoming movement strategic direction. We have finished this process and have some results to share with you.
Product is now known as Audiences, and other changes in that department
In order to more intentionally commit to a focus on the needs of users, we are making changes to the names of teams and department (and will be using these names throughout the rest of this update):
-
The Product department will be renamed the Audiences department; -
The Editing team will now be called the Contributors team; -
The Reading team will be renamed the Readers team.
You might be asking: what does “audience” mean in this context? We define it as a specific group of people who will use the products we build. For example, “readers” is one audience. “Contributors” is another. Designing products around who will be utilizing them most, rather than what we would like those products to do, is a best practice in product development. We want our organizational structure to support that approach.
We are making five notable changes to the Audiences department structure.
The first is that we are migrating folks working on search and discovery from the stand-alone Discovery team into the Readers team and Technology department, respectively. Specifically, the team working on our search backend infrastructure will move to Technology, where they will report to Victoria. The team working on maps, the search experience, and the project entry portals (such as Wikipedia.org) will join the Readers team. This realignment will allow us to build more integrated experiences and knowledge-sharing for the end user.
The second is that the Fundraising Tech team will also move to the Technology department. This move recognizes that their core work is primarily platform development and integration, and brings them into closer cooperation with their peers in critical functions including MediaWiki Platform, Security, Analytics, and Operations.
The Team Practices group (TPG) will also be undergoing some changes. Currently, TPG supports both specific teams in Product, as well as supporting broader organizational development. Going forward, those TPG members directly supporting feature teams will be embedded in their respective teams in the Audiences or Technology departments. The TPG members who were primarily focused on organizational health and development will move to the Talent & Culture department, where they will report to Anna Stillwell.
These three changes lead to the fourth, which is the move from four “audience” verticals in the department (Reading, Editing, Discovery, and Fundraising Tech, plus Team Practices) to three: Readers, Contributors, and Community Tech. This structure is meant to streamline our focus on the people we serve with our feature and product development, increase team accountability and ownership over their work, allow Community Tech to maintain its unique, effective, and multi-audiences workflow, and better integrate support directly where teams need it most.
One final change: in the past we have had a design director. We recognize that design is critical to creating exceptional experiences as a contributor or a reader, so we’re bringing that role back. The director for design will report to the interim Vice President of Product. The Design Research function, currently under the Research team in the Technology department, will report to the new director once the role is filled.
Technology is increasingly “programmatic”
The Technology department is also making a series of improvements in the way we operate so that we can better serve the movement.
The biggest change is that all of our work in fiscal year 2017-2018 will be structured and reported in programs instead of teams (you can see how this works in our proposed 2017-2018 Annual Plan).[2] This will help us focus on the collective impact we want to make, rather than limiting ourselves to the way our organization is structured. These programs will be enabled by the platforms (MediaWiki, Fundraising Tech, Search, Wikimedia Cloud Services, APIs, ORES, and Analytics) that the Technology department builds and maintains, and they will be delivered by teams that provide critical services (Operations, Performance, Security, Release Engineering, and Research). Distinguishing the work of the Technology department into platforms and services will also allow us to treat platforms as products, with accountable product managers and defined roadmaps.
In addition to moving the Search subteam into Technology, we are creating a separate ORES team. These changes mark the start of something big - investing in building machine learning, machine translation, natural language processing and related competencies. This is the first step towards supporting intelligent, humanized, user interfaces for our communities - something we’re thinking of as “human tech”. Not because we think that machines will replace our humans, but because these tools cans help our humans be much more productive.
Why these changes, why now?
When the Product and Technology departments were reorganized in 2015,[1] the stated goal was establishing verticals to focus on specific groups of users and to speed execution by reducing dependencies among teams. These smaller changes are meant to “tune-up” that structure, by addressing some of its weaknesses and making additional improvements to the structure of our engineering work.
The process that brought us to these changes began informally shortly after Victoria arrived, and took on a more formal tone once Wes announced his departure in May. Katherine asked Anna Stillwell, the Foundation's newly-appointed Chargée d’Affaires in the Talent & Culture department, to facilitate a consultation with both departments to identify their pain points, and better understand their cultural and structural needs. After collecting feedback from 93 people across the two departments, as well as stakeholders around the organization, she offered a draft proposal for open comment within the Foundation. After making some changes to reflect staff feedback, the Foundation’s leadership team decided to proceed with the changes described above.
The leaders of some of the teams involved will be following up in the next few days with the specifics of these organizational moves and what they mean to our communities. If you still have questions, please ask here or on the talk page of this announcement: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Talk:Wikimedia_Engineering/June_2017_changes.
Best regards,
Toby Negrin, Interim Vice President of Product Victoria Coleman, Chief Technology Officer
PS. An on-wiki version of this message is available for translation: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Engineering/June_2017_changes
[1] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Engineering_reorganizat...
[2] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Annual_Plan/2017-2018/D...
Hi Toby,
Thanks for sharing the reorg information. From my perspective as an outsider, this sounds good.
I have a question about the sentences "The biggest change is that all of our work in fiscal year 2017-2018 will be structured and reported in programs instead of teams (you can see how this works in our proposed 2017-2018 Annual Plan). This will help us focus on the collective impact we want to make, rather than limiting ourselves to the way our organization is structured."
I would like to see WMF move fully to project-based budgeting (there are a variety of names for similar approaches), and the change that you describe here sounds like a step in that direction. Will WMF move fully to project-based budgeting by the time of the 2018-2019 Annual Plan? That would involve each project (such as "redesign of www.wikimediafoundation.org") having a project budget, and the collection of chosen projects with their budgets would constitute the Annual Plan. (The methodology for choosing projects varies among organizations that do this kind of budgeting; I would imagine that WMF could use its values, the outcomes of the strategy process, and the annual Board guidance about the budget as major factors in selecting projects.)
Thanks,
Pine
On Wed, Jun 7, 2017 at 2:12 PM, Toby Negrin tnegrin@wikimedia.org wrote:
Hi everybody,
We have made some changes to our Product and Technology departments which we are excited to tell you about. When Wes Moran, former Vice President of Product, left the Wikimedia Foundation in May, we took the opportunity to review the organization and operating principles that were guiding Product and Technology. Our objectives were to improve our engagement with the community during product development, develop a more audience-based approach to building products, and create as efficient a pipeline as possible between an idea and its deployment. We also wanted an approach that would better prepare our engineering teams to plan around the upcoming movement strategic direction. We have finished this process and have some results to share with you.
Product is now known as Audiences, and other changes in that department
In order to more intentionally commit to a focus on the needs of users, we are making changes to the names of teams and department (and will be using these names throughout the rest of this update):
The Product department will be renamed the Audiences department;
The Editing team will now be called the Contributors team;
The Reading team will be renamed the Readers team.
You might be asking: what does “audience” mean in this context? We define it as a specific group of people who will use the products we build. For example, “readers” is one audience. “Contributors” is another. Designing products around who will be utilizing them most, rather than what we would like those products to do, is a best practice in product development. We want our organizational structure to support that approach.
We are making five notable changes to the Audiences department structure.
The first is that we are migrating folks working on search and discovery from the stand-alone Discovery team into the Readers team and Technology department, respectively. Specifically, the team working on our search backend infrastructure will move to Technology, where they will report to Victoria. The team working on maps, the search experience, and the project entry portals (such as Wikipedia.org) will join the Readers team. This realignment will allow us to build more integrated experiences and knowledge-sharing for the end user.
The second is that the Fundraising Tech team will also move to the Technology department. This move recognizes that their core work is primarily platform development and integration, and brings them into closer cooperation with their peers in critical functions including MediaWiki Platform, Security, Analytics, and Operations.
The Team Practices group (TPG) will also be undergoing some changes. Currently, TPG supports both specific teams in Product, as well as supporting broader organizational development. Going forward, those TPG members directly supporting feature teams will be embedded in their respective teams in the Audiences or Technology departments. The TPG members who were primarily focused on organizational health and development will move to the Talent & Culture department, where they will report to Anna Stillwell.
These three changes lead to the fourth, which is the move from four “audience” verticals in the department (Reading, Editing, Discovery, and Fundraising Tech, plus Team Practices) to three: Readers, Contributors, and Community Tech. This structure is meant to streamline our focus on the people we serve with our feature and product development, increase team accountability and ownership over their work, allow Community Tech to maintain its unique, effective, and multi-audiences workflow, and better integrate support directly where teams need it most.
One final change: in the past we have had a design director. We recognize that design is critical to creating exceptional experiences as a contributor or a reader, so we’re bringing that role back. The director for design will report to the interim Vice President of Product. The Design Research function, currently under the Research team in the Technology department, will report to the new director once the role is filled.
Technology is increasingly “programmatic”
The Technology department is also making a series of improvements in the way we operate so that we can better serve the movement.
The biggest change is that all of our work in fiscal year 2017-2018 will be structured and reported in programs instead of teams (you can see how this works in our proposed 2017-2018 Annual Plan).[2] This will help us focus on the collective impact we want to make, rather than limiting ourselves to the way our organization is structured. These programs will be enabled by the platforms (MediaWiki, Fundraising Tech, Search, Wikimedia Cloud Services, APIs, ORES, and Analytics) that the Technology department builds and maintains, and they will be delivered by teams that provide critical services (Operations, Performance, Security, Release Engineering, and Research). Distinguishing the work of the Technology department into platforms and services will also allow us to treat platforms as products, with accountable product managers and defined roadmaps.
In addition to moving the Search subteam into Technology, we are creating a separate ORES team. These changes mark the start of something big - investing in building machine learning, machine translation, natural language processing and related competencies. This is the first step towards supporting intelligent, humanized, user interfaces for our communities - something we’re thinking of as “human tech”. Not because we think that machines will replace our humans, but because these tools cans help our humans be much more productive.
Why these changes, why now?
When the Product and Technology departments were reorganized in 2015,[1] the stated goal was establishing verticals to focus on specific groups of users and to speed execution by reducing dependencies among teams. These smaller changes are meant to “tune-up” that structure, by addressing some of its weaknesses and making additional improvements to the structure of our engineering work.
The process that brought us to these changes began informally shortly after Victoria arrived, and took on a more formal tone once Wes announced his departure in May. Katherine asked Anna Stillwell, the Foundation's newly-appointed Chargée d’Affaires in the Talent & Culture department, to facilitate a consultation with both departments to identify their pain points, and better understand their cultural and structural needs. After collecting feedback from 93 people across the two departments, as well as stakeholders around the organization, she offered a draft proposal for open comment within the Foundation. After making some changes to reflect staff feedback, the Foundation’s leadership team decided to proceed with the changes described above.
The leaders of some of the teams involved will be following up in the next few days with the specifics of these organizational moves and what they mean to our communities. If you still have questions, please ask here or on the talk page of this announcement: https://www.mediawiki.org/ wiki/Talk:Wikimedia_Engineering/June_2017_changes.
Best regards,
Toby Negrin, Interim Vice President of Product Victoria Coleman, Chief Technology Officer
PS. An on-wiki version of this message is available for translation: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Engineering/June_2017_changes
[1] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_ Engineering_reorganization_FAQ
[2] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_ Annual_Plan/2017-2018/Draft
Please note: all replies sent to this mailing list will be immediately directed to Wikimedia-l, the public mailing list of the Wikimedia community. For more information about Wikimedia-l: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l _______________________________________________ WikimediaAnnounce-l mailing list WikimediaAnnounce-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediaannounce-l
Hi Pine,
the wording in quotes bellow refers to the Technology Department. We have made the change this year (and we will continue down this path in future years) in order to be able to articulate clearly the impact our work has on the mission and the movement. In the Tech world it’s really easy to get lost in what we do vs why we do it and this programmatic focus across all of our work will let us be much clearer on the impact we are aiming for. We hope that this transparency will allow us to have broader conversations with the community about our work and our direction. It’s a change for us and we are working to implement it in the way we report on our work but we are looking forward to sharing our progress with the community in the coming months. Meantime you may want to take a look at https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Annual_Plan/2017-2018/D... https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Annual_Plan/2017-2018/Draft/Staff_and_Contractors where we are reporting out our investments for fiscal 2017-18 both on a per program as well as per team basis. So that we can easily tell what we are investing in what initiatives.
All the best,
Victoria
On Jun 7, 2017, at 7:20 PM, Pine W wiki.pine@gmail.com wrote:
Hi Toby,
Thanks for sharing the reorg information. From my perspective as an outsider, this sounds good.
I have a question about the sentences "The biggest change is that all of our work in fiscal year 2017-2018 will be structured and reported in programs instead of teams (you can see how this works in our proposed 2017-2018 Annual Plan). This will help us focus on the collective impact we want to make, rather than limiting ourselves to the way our organization is structured."
I would like to see WMF move fully to project-based budgeting (there are a variety of names for similar approaches), and the change that you describe here sounds like a step in that direction. Will WMF move fully to project-based budgeting by the time of the 2018-2019 Annual Plan? That would involve each project (such as "redesign of www.wikimediafoundation.org") having a project budget, and the collection of chosen projects with their budgets would constitute the Annual Plan. (The methodology for choosing projects varies among organizations that do this kind of budgeting; I would imagine that WMF could use its values, the outcomes of the strategy process, and the annual Board guidance about the budget as major factors in selecting projects.)
Thanks,
Pine
On Wed, Jun 7, 2017 at 2:12 PM, Toby Negrin tnegrin@wikimedia.org wrote:
Hi everybody,
We have made some changes to our Product and Technology departments which we are excited to tell you about. When Wes Moran, former Vice President of Product, left the Wikimedia Foundation in May, we took the opportunity to review the organization and operating principles that were guiding Product and Technology. Our objectives were to improve our engagement with the community during product development, develop a more audience-based approach to building products, and create as efficient a pipeline as possible between an idea and its deployment. We also wanted an approach that would better prepare our engineering teams to plan around the upcoming movement strategic direction. We have finished this process and have some results to share with you.
Product is now known as Audiences, and other changes in that department
In order to more intentionally commit to a focus on the needs of users, we are making changes to the names of teams and department (and will be using these names throughout the rest of this update):
The Product department will be renamed the Audiences department;
The Editing team will now be called the Contributors team;
The Reading team will be renamed the Readers team.
You might be asking: what does “audience” mean in this context? We define it as a specific group of people who will use the products we build. For example, “readers” is one audience. “Contributors” is another. Designing products around who will be utilizing them most, rather than what we would like those products to do, is a best practice in product development. We want our organizational structure to support that approach.
We are making five notable changes to the Audiences department structure.
The first is that we are migrating folks working on search and discovery from the stand-alone Discovery team into the Readers team and Technology department, respectively. Specifically, the team working on our search backend infrastructure will move to Technology, where they will report to Victoria. The team working on maps, the search experience, and the project entry portals (such as Wikipedia.org) will join the Readers team. This realignment will allow us to build more integrated experiences and knowledge-sharing for the end user.
The second is that the Fundraising Tech team will also move to the Technology department. This move recognizes that their core work is primarily platform development and integration, and brings them into closer cooperation with their peers in critical functions including MediaWiki Platform, Security, Analytics, and Operations.
The Team Practices group (TPG) will also be undergoing some changes. Currently, TPG supports both specific teams in Product, as well as supporting broader organizational development. Going forward, those TPG members directly supporting feature teams will be embedded in their respective teams in the Audiences or Technology departments. The TPG members who were primarily focused on organizational health and development will move to the Talent & Culture department, where they will report to Anna Stillwell.
These three changes lead to the fourth, which is the move from four “audience” verticals in the department (Reading, Editing, Discovery, and Fundraising Tech, plus Team Practices) to three: Readers, Contributors, and Community Tech. This structure is meant to streamline our focus on the people we serve with our feature and product development, increase team accountability and ownership over their work, allow Community Tech to maintain its unique, effective, and multi-audiences workflow, and better integrate support directly where teams need it most.
One final change: in the past we have had a design director. We recognize that design is critical to creating exceptional experiences as a contributor or a reader, so we’re bringing that role back. The director for design will report to the interim Vice President of Product. The Design Research function, currently under the Research team in the Technology department, will report to the new director once the role is filled.
Technology is increasingly “programmatic”
The Technology department is also making a series of improvements in the way we operate so that we can better serve the movement.
The biggest change is that all of our work in fiscal year 2017-2018 will be structured and reported in programs instead of teams (you can see how this works in our proposed 2017-2018 Annual Plan).[2] This will help us focus on the collective impact we want to make, rather than limiting ourselves to the way our organization is structured. These programs will be enabled by the platforms (MediaWiki, Fundraising Tech, Search, Wikimedia Cloud Services, APIs, ORES, and Analytics) that the Technology department builds and maintains, and they will be delivered by teams that provide critical services (Operations, Performance, Security, Release Engineering, and Research). Distinguishing the work of the Technology department into platforms and services will also allow us to treat platforms as products, with accountable product managers and defined roadmaps.
In addition to moving the Search subteam into Technology, we are creating a separate ORES team. These changes mark the start of something big - investing in building machine learning, machine translation, natural language processing and related competencies. This is the first step towards supporting intelligent, humanized, user interfaces for our communities - something we’re thinking of as “human tech”. Not because we think that machines will replace our humans, but because these tools cans help our humans be much more productive.
Why these changes, why now?
When the Product and Technology departments were reorganized in 2015,[1] the stated goal was establishing verticals to focus on specific groups of users and to speed execution by reducing dependencies among teams. These smaller changes are meant to “tune-up” that structure, by addressing some of its weaknesses and making additional improvements to the structure of our engineering work.
The process that brought us to these changes began informally shortly after Victoria arrived, and took on a more formal tone once Wes announced his departure in May. Katherine asked Anna Stillwell, the Foundation's newly-appointed Chargée d’Affaires in the Talent & Culture department, to facilitate a consultation with both departments to identify their pain points, and better understand their cultural and structural needs. After collecting feedback from 93 people across the two departments, as well as stakeholders around the organization, she offered a draft proposal for open comment within the Foundation. After making some changes to reflect staff feedback, the Foundation’s leadership team decided to proceed with the changes described above.
The leaders of some of the teams involved will be following up in the next few days with the specifics of these organizational moves and what they mean to our communities. If you still have questions, please ask here or on the talk page of this announcement: https://www.mediawiki.org/ wiki/Talk:Wikimedia_Engineering/June_2017_changes.
Best regards,
Toby Negrin, Interim Vice President of Product Victoria Coleman, Chief Technology Officer
PS. An on-wiki version of this message is available for translation: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Engineering/June_2017_changes
[1] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_ Engineering_reorganization_FAQ
[2] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_ Annual_Plan/2017-2018/Draft
Please note: all replies sent to this mailing list will be immediately directed to Wikimedia-l, the public mailing list of the Wikimedia community. For more information about Wikimedia-l: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l _______________________________________________ WikimediaAnnounce-l mailing list WikimediaAnnounce-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediaannounce-l
Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
2017-06-07 23:12 GMT+02:00 Toby Negrin tnegrin@wikimedia.org:
The team working on maps, the search experience, and the project entry portals (such as Wikipedia.org) will join the Readers team. This realignment will allow us to build more integrated experiences and knowledge-sharing for the end user.
Does maps going to readers mean that there will be less focus on editors tools for adding maps to articles and more focus on the readers possibility to interact with the maps? If so, what is actually in the pipeline for maps?
/Jan
Thanks for explaining that. You said that two of the main goals were "to improve our engagement with the community during product development, develop a more audience-based approach to building products", and yet you do not mention any discussion with people outside the organisation over their needs and aspirations and whether the new structures under consideration were more or less likely to deliver them – some people might see that as a missing element in the process. Perhaps you could say a few words about how the new structures will improve cooperation and collaboration in order to"better serve the movement". You do see a need for improved consultation, cooperation and collaboration with the community, don't you?
On Thu, Jun 8, 2017 at 10:21 PM, Jan Ainali ainali.jan@gmail.com wrote:
2017-06-07 23:12 GMT+02:00 Toby Negrin tnegrin@wikimedia.org:
The team working on maps, the search experience, and the project entry portals (such as Wikipedia.org) will join the Readers team. This realignment will allow us to build more integrated experiences and knowledge-sharing for the end user.
Does maps going to readers mean that there will be less focus on editors tools for adding maps to articles and more focus on the readers possibility to interact with the maps? If so, what is actually in the pipeline for maps?
/Jan _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/ wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/ wiki/Wikimedia-l New messages to: Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
Hi Jan --
Thanks for the question. We'll be making a more specific announcement this week about the future of the discovery projects. Sadly we don't have a lot of new information for maps in particular and will need to do a bit more scenario planning before we talk to the community.
As far as focus, most of our "reading" features are actually content created by editors that is consumed by readers and maps is no different. While we don't have specifics as far as the roadmap, both authoring and consumption features are totally in scope.
Hope this helps to provide some information (if not clarity :) about how we are approaching this.
-Toby
On Thu, Jun 8, 2017 at 2:21 PM, Jan Ainali ainali.jan@gmail.com wrote:
2017-06-07 23:12 GMT+02:00 Toby Negrin tnegrin@wikimedia.org:
The team working on maps, the search experience, and the project entry portals (such as Wikipedia.org) will join the Readers team. This realignment will allow us to build more integrated experiences and knowledge-sharing for the end user.
Does maps going to readers mean that there will be less focus on editors tools for adding maps to articles and more focus on the readers possibility to interact with the maps? If so, what is actually in the pipeline for maps?
/Jan _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/ wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/ wiki/Wikimedia-l New messages to: Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
Looks like a reasonable change. Glad to see the degree of internal input that went into it.
Does maps also include other rich content like graphs, charts, heat maps and other forms of data visualization?
Best James
On Mon, Jun 12, 2017 at 8:44 AM, Toby Negrin tnegrin@wikimedia.org wrote:
Hi Jan --
Thanks for the question. We'll be making a more specific announcement this week about the future of the discovery projects. Sadly we don't have a lot of new information for maps in particular and will need to do a bit more scenario planning before we talk to the community.
As far as focus, most of our "reading" features are actually content created by editors that is consumed by readers and maps is no different. While we don't have specifics as far as the roadmap, both authoring and consumption features are totally in scope.
Hope this helps to provide some information (if not clarity :) about how we are approaching this.
-Toby
On Thu, Jun 8, 2017 at 2:21 PM, Jan Ainali ainali.jan@gmail.com wrote:
2017-06-07 23:12 GMT+02:00 Toby Negrin tnegrin@wikimedia.org:
The team working on maps, the search experience, and the project entry portals (such as Wikipedia.org) will join the Readers team. This realignment will allow us to build more integrated experiences and knowledge-sharing for the end user.
Does maps going to readers mean that there will be less focus on editors tools for adding maps to articles and more focus on the readers
possibility
to interact with the maps? If so, what is actually in the pipeline for maps?
/Jan _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/ wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/ wiki/Wikimedia-l New messages to: Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/ wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/ wiki/Wikimedia-l New messages to: Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
James: thanks for asking; I'm copying that question to the Wikitech list. While we're on that topic, what's happening to multimedia? I believe that at one time there was a multimedia team, and I could understand how pairing multimedia with maps in the same team could make sense. If multimedia is separate, it would be good to know where that's being housed now; I believe that there's work happening with 3D files for Commons, and I vaguely recall hearing about improvements to the Commons upload wizard.
Pine
On Mon, Jun 12, 2017 at 8:07 AM, James Heilman jmh649@gmail.com wrote:
Looks like a reasonable change. Glad to see the degree of internal input that went into it.
Does maps also include other rich content like graphs, charts, heat maps and other forms of data visualization?
Best James
On Mon, Jun 12, 2017 at 8:44 AM, Toby Negrin tnegrin@wikimedia.org wrote:
Hi Jan --
Thanks for the question. We'll be making a more specific announcement
this
week about the future of the discovery projects. Sadly we don't have a
lot
of new information for maps in particular and will need to do a bit more scenario planning before we talk to the community.
As far as focus, most of our "reading" features are actually content created by editors that is consumed by readers and maps is no different. While we don't have specifics as far as the roadmap, both authoring and consumption features are totally in scope.
Hope this helps to provide some information (if not clarity :) about how
we
are approaching this.
-Toby
On Thu, Jun 8, 2017 at 2:21 PM, Jan Ainali ainali.jan@gmail.com wrote:
2017-06-07 23:12 GMT+02:00 Toby Negrin tnegrin@wikimedia.org:
The team working on maps, the search experience, and the project
entry
portals (such as Wikipedia.org) will join the Readers team. This realignment will allow us to build more integrated experiences and knowledge-sharing for the end user.
Does maps going to readers mean that there will be less focus on
editors
tools for adding maps to articles and more focus on the readers
possibility
to interact with the maps? If so, what is actually in the pipeline for maps?
/Jan _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/ wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/ wiki/Wikimedia-l New messages to: Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
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-- James Heilman MD, CCFP-EM, Wikipedian
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Multimedia was recently moved to the Reading (now Readers) vertical. To the best of my knowledge that isn’t changing.
On June 12, 2017 at 12:52:44 PM, Pine W (wiki.pine@gmail.com) wrote:
James: thanks for asking; I'm copying that question to the Wikitech list. While we're on that topic, what's happening to multimedia? I believe that at one time there was a multimedia team, and I could understand how pairing multimedia with maps in the same team could make sense. If multimedia is separate, it would be good to know where that's being housed now; I believe that there's work happening with 3D files for Commons, and I vaguely recall hearing about improvements to the Commons upload wizard.
Pine
On Mon, Jun 12, 2017 at 8:07 AM, James Heilman jmh649@gmail.com wrote:
Looks like a reasonable change. Glad to see the degree of internal input that went into it.
Does maps also include other rich content like graphs, charts, heat maps and other forms of data visualization?
Best James
On Mon, Jun 12, 2017 at 8:44 AM, Toby Negrin tnegrin@wikimedia.org wrote:
Hi Jan --
Thanks for the question. We'll be making a more specific announcement
this
week about the future of the discovery projects. Sadly we don't have a
lot
of new information for maps in particular and will need to do a bit more scenario planning before we talk to the community.
As far as focus, most of our "reading" features are actually content created by editors that is consumed by readers and maps is no different. While we don't have specifics as far as the roadmap, both authoring and consumption features are totally in scope.
Hope this helps to provide some information (if not clarity :) about how
we
are approaching this.
-Toby
On Thu, Jun 8, 2017 at 2:21 PM, Jan Ainali ainali.jan@gmail.com wrote:
2017-06-07 23:12 GMT+02:00 Toby Negrin tnegrin@wikimedia.org:
The team working on maps, the search experience, and the project
entry
portals (such as Wikipedia.org) will join the Readers team. This realignment will allow us to build more integrated experiences and knowledge-sharing for the end user.
Does maps going to readers mean that there will be less focus on
editors
tools for adding maps to articles and more focus on the readers
possibility
to interact with the maps? If so, what is actually in the pipeline for maps?
/Jan _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/ wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/ wiki/Wikimedia-l New messages to: Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
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-- James Heilman MD, CCFP-EM, Wikipedian
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Hi James,
Does maps also include other rich content like graphs, charts, heat maps
and other forms of data visualization?
In reference to your question above, have you had a chance to read through the email that was sent yesterday, in regards to the Discovery team? [1] We discussed maps and graphs in that email, but not things like heat maps or other data visualizations as those are not a part of Discovery's current annual goals.
Cheers,
Deb
[1] https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimedia-l/2017-June/087777.html
-- deb tankersley irc: debt Product Manager, Discovery Wikimedia Foundation
On Mon, Jun 12, 2017 at 9:07 AM, James Heilman jmh649@gmail.com wrote:
Looks like a reasonable change. Glad to see the degree of internal input that went into it.
Does maps also include other rich content like graphs, charts, heat maps and other forms of data visualization?
Best James
On Mon, Jun 12, 2017 at 8:44 AM, Toby Negrin tnegrin@wikimedia.org wrote:
Hi Jan --
Thanks for the question. We'll be making a more specific announcement
this
week about the future of the discovery projects. Sadly we don't have a
lot
of new information for maps in particular and will need to do a bit more scenario planning before we talk to the community.
As far as focus, most of our "reading" features are actually content created by editors that is consumed by readers and maps is no different. While we don't have specifics as far as the roadmap, both authoring and consumption features are totally in scope.
Hope this helps to provide some information (if not clarity :) about how
we
are approaching this.
-Toby
On Thu, Jun 8, 2017 at 2:21 PM, Jan Ainali ainali.jan@gmail.com wrote:
2017-06-07 23:12 GMT+02:00 Toby Negrin tnegrin@wikimedia.org:
The team working on maps, the search experience, and the project
entry
portals (such as Wikipedia.org) will join the Readers team. This realignment will allow us to build more integrated experiences and knowledge-sharing for the end user.
Does maps going to readers mean that there will be less focus on
editors
tools for adding maps to articles and more focus on the readers
possibility
to interact with the maps? If so, what is actually in the pipeline for maps?
/Jan _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/ wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/ wiki/Wikimedia-l New messages to: Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
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-- James Heilman MD, CCFP-EM, Wikipedian
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This looks reasonably rational to me. I am not sufficiently expert to be able to make more specific comments. One thing I would like to know - in the new arrangement, where does the group responsible for fundraising user interface fit in? Are they tech or audience? Cheers, Peter
-----Original Message----- From: Wikimedia-l [mailto:wikimedia-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Toby Negrin Sent: Wednesday, 07 June 2017 11:13 PM To: wikitech@lists.wikimedia.org; Wikimedia Mailing List; WikimediaAnnounce-l@lists.wikimedia.org Subject: [Wikimedia-l] Changes to Product and Technology departments at the Foundation
Hi everybody,
We have made some changes to our Product and Technology departments which we are excited to tell you about. When Wes Moran, former Vice President of Product, left the Wikimedia Foundation in May, we took the opportunity to review the organization and operating principles that were guiding Product and Technology. Our objectives were to improve our engagement with the community during product development, develop a more audience-based approach to building products, and create as efficient a pipeline as possible between an idea and its deployment. We also wanted an approach that would better prepare our engineering teams to plan around the upcoming movement strategic direction. We have finished this process and have some results to share with you.
Product is now known as Audiences, and other changes in that department
In order to more intentionally commit to a focus on the needs of users, we are making changes to the names of teams and department (and will be using these names throughout the rest of this update):
-
The Product department will be renamed the Audiences department; -
The Editing team will now be called the Contributors team; -
The Reading team will be renamed the Readers team.
You might be asking: what does “audience” mean in this context? We define it as a specific group of people who will use the products we build. For example, “readers” is one audience. “Contributors” is another. Designing products around who will be utilizing them most, rather than what we would like those products to do, is a best practice in product development. We want our organizational structure to support that approach.
We are making five notable changes to the Audiences department structure.
The first is that we are migrating folks working on search and discovery from the stand-alone Discovery team into the Readers team and Technology department, respectively. Specifically, the team working on our search backend infrastructure will move to Technology, where they will report to Victoria. The team working on maps, the search experience, and the project entry portals (such as Wikipedia.org) will join the Readers team. This realignment will allow us to build more integrated experiences and knowledge-sharing for the end user.
The second is that the Fundraising Tech team will also move to the Technology department. This move recognizes that their core work is primarily platform development and integration, and brings them into closer cooperation with their peers in critical functions including MediaWiki Platform, Security, Analytics, and Operations.
The Team Practices group (TPG) will also be undergoing some changes. Currently, TPG supports both specific teams in Product, as well as supporting broader organizational development. Going forward, those TPG members directly supporting feature teams will be embedded in their respective teams in the Audiences or Technology departments. The TPG members who were primarily focused on organizational health and development will move to the Talent & Culture department, where they will report to Anna Stillwell.
These three changes lead to the fourth, which is the move from four “audience” verticals in the department (Reading, Editing, Discovery, and Fundraising Tech, plus Team Practices) to three: Readers, Contributors, and Community Tech. This structure is meant to streamline our focus on the people we serve with our feature and product development, increase team accountability and ownership over their work, allow Community Tech to maintain its unique, effective, and multi-audiences workflow, and better integrate support directly where teams need it most.
One final change: in the past we have had a design director. We recognize that design is critical to creating exceptional experiences as a contributor or a reader, so we’re bringing that role back. The director for design will report to the interim Vice President of Product. The Design Research function, currently under the Research team in the Technology department, will report to the new director once the role is filled.
Technology is increasingly “programmatic”
The Technology department is also making a series of improvements in the way we operate so that we can better serve the movement.
The biggest change is that all of our work in fiscal year 2017-2018 will be structured and reported in programs instead of teams (you can see how this works in our proposed 2017-2018 Annual Plan).[2] This will help us focus on the collective impact we want to make, rather than limiting ourselves to the way our organization is structured. These programs will be enabled by the platforms (MediaWiki, Fundraising Tech, Search, Wikimedia Cloud Services, APIs, ORES, and Analytics) that the Technology department builds and maintains, and they will be delivered by teams that provide critical services (Operations, Performance, Security, Release Engineering, and Research). Distinguishing the work of the Technology department into platforms and services will also allow us to treat platforms as products, with accountable product managers and defined roadmaps.
In addition to moving the Search subteam into Technology, we are creating a separate ORES team. These changes mark the start of something big - investing in building machine learning, machine translation, natural language processing and related competencies. This is the first step towards supporting intelligent, humanized, user interfaces for our communities - something we’re thinking of as “human tech”. Not because we think that machines will replace our humans, but because these tools cans help our humans be much more productive.
Why these changes, why now?
When the Product and Technology departments were reorganized in 2015,[1] the stated goal was establishing verticals to focus on specific groups of users and to speed execution by reducing dependencies among teams. These smaller changes are meant to “tune-up” that structure, by addressing some of its weaknesses and making additional improvements to the structure of our engineering work.
The process that brought us to these changes began informally shortly after Victoria arrived, and took on a more formal tone once Wes announced his departure in May. Katherine asked Anna Stillwell, the Foundation's newly-appointed Chargée d’Affaires in the Talent & Culture department, to facilitate a consultation with both departments to identify their pain points, and better understand their cultural and structural needs. After collecting feedback from 93 people across the two departments, as well as stakeholders around the organization, she offered a draft proposal for open comment within the Foundation. After making some changes to reflect staff feedback, the Foundation’s leadership team decided to proceed with the changes described above.
The leaders of some of the teams involved will be following up in the next few days with the specifics of these organizational moves and what they mean to our communities. If you still have questions, please ask here or on the talk page of this announcement: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Talk:Wikimedia_Engineering/June_2017_changes.
Best regards,
Toby Negrin, Interim Vice President of Product Victoria Coleman, Chief Technology Officer
PS. An on-wiki version of this message is available for translation: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Engineering/June_2017_changes
[1] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Engineering_reorganizat...
[2] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Annual_Plan/2017-2018/D... _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l New messages to: Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
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