Subcomandante Marcos told what the best virtue of a guerrillero is the
patience.
Welcome Damon!
El feb 14, 2015 1:55 a.m., "Pine W" <wiki.pine(a)gmail.com> escribió:
Just following up on this: when will the mid-year WMF
financials be
published with Annual Plan alignment/divergance info? This info is relevant
for 2015-2016 planning, and to some extent, the strategy update.
Thanks. (:
Pine
On Oct 9, 2014 12:18 PM, "Pine W" <wiki.pine(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Thank you Lila.
Pine
On Oct 9, 2014 11:50 AM, "Lila Tretikov" <lila(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:
> We are planning to do a review of alignment/divergence with the plan mid
> year. That would be the right time for this discussion as we will have a
> good overview/gap analysis at that time.
>
> On Thu, Oct 9, 2014 at 11:37 AM, Pine W <wiki.pine(a)gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > Thanks for the detailed comments, Erik.
> >
> > As someone who spent several volunteer hours reviewing the current
> Annual
> > Plan, I would appreciate getting an understanding of how the change of
> > emphasis to quarterly reviews affects budgets, hiring plans, and
> > fundraising goals. Is that something that you can address or should I
> ask
> > Garfield?
> >
> > Thanks,
> > Pine
> > On Oct 9, 2014 4:44 AM, "Erik Moeller" <erik(a)wikimedia.org>
wrote:
> >
> > > On Thu, Oct 9, 2014 at 10:26 AM, Pine W <wiki.pine(a)gmail.com>
wrote:
> > >
> > > > I'm sure a Board member, Lila, or Erik will correct me if I am
> > mistaken,
> > > > but my understanding is that there is internal agreement at Board
> level
> > > > that the Product side of the org needs some systemic changes, that
> Lila
> > > was
> > > > chosen with the goal of making those changes, and that some
changes
> are
> > > > already happening.
> > >
> > > There's agreement at all levels that we want to continue down the
path
> > > set by Sue back in 2012 [1] for WMF
to truly understand itself as a
> > > technology and grantmaking organization. That path led to where we
are
> > > today:
> > >
> > > 1) As part of the ED transition, Sue recommended (and the Board
> > > accepted the recommendation) to seek an ED with a strong
> > > technology/product background, and we hired Lila Tretikov as Sue's
> > > successor who matches those requirements.
> > >
> > > 2) In November 2012, I recommended that we prepare for building out
> > > new functions for UX and Analytics, and prepare for dedicated
> > > leadership for Engineering and Product. Sue accepted this
> > > recommendation. I hired Directors for UX and Analytics in 2013,
> > > followed by Community Engagement in 2014, and finally we hired a VP
> > > Engineering last week to complete the process.
> > >
> > > 3) To better account for the need to learn quickly and adjust course
> > > as appropriate, we introduced quarterly reviews in December 2012 [3]
> > > and increasingly reduced the specificity of Annual Plan level
> > > commitments while increasing the focus on metrics and accountability
> > > in the reviews.
> > >
> > > 4) On the technology and product front, many improvements to process
> > > and support infrastructure have been implemented in the last couple
of
> > > years, including but not limited
to:
> > >
> > > - Development of MediaWiki Vagrant as a standardized dev
environment,
> > > to reduce failure cases due to
developer environment inconsistencies
> > > - Improvements to continuous integration infrastructure for PHP unit
> > > tests and QUnit JavaScript unit tests, and increased focus (but not
> > > nearly enough yet) on automated tests, especially for newly
developed
> > > features
> > > - Introduction and continued improvement of BetaLabs as a staging
> > > environment for all commits, increased use of automated end-to-end
> > > browser tests and QA testing by humans to catch bugs and regressions
> > > prior to production rollouts
> > > - Introduction and use of various tools for measuring the impact of
> > > features, including EventLogging as a standard instrumentation
> > > framework for measuring feature usage, dashboards for visualizing
> > > usage, WikiMetrics for analyzing editor cohort behavior, Editor
> > > Engagement Vital Signs for understanding system-wide user behavior,
> > > analysis of pageview data using Hadoop (just rolled out), etc.
> > > - Highly specialized automated testing frameworks for specific
> > > projects, e.g. Parsoid round-trip testing and visual diffing (!) to
> > > detect dirty diffs or output problems
> > > - Introduction of design research as a discipline in the UX team
> > > (through hiring of Abbey Ripstra as User Research Lead) and
> > > incorporation of user studies in a much more systematic way across
> > > products
> > > - Community liaisons dedicated to key products, responding to user
> > > feedback and helping Product Managers understand more complex
> > > community needs
> > > - Continued shortening of release/deployment cycles; significant
> > > improvements to deployment tooling, rewriting our legacy "scap"
tools
> > > to increase the ability to monitor
and reason about deployments;
> > > introduction of daily "SWAT" deploys to quickly release fixes,
etc.
> > > - Introduction of various infrastructure tools that help us better
> > > analyze/profile issues, including logstash for log analysis,
increased
> > > use of graphite for performance
metrics collection and various
> > > front-ends for visualizing those metrics
> > > - Shift towards loosely coupled services, addressing the difficulty
of
> > > maintaining and improving our
highly monolithic codebase (examples
> > > include Parsoid, Citoid, Mathoid, and the new Content API in
> > > development)
> > > - Introduction of Beta Features framework to stage features for
early
> > > adopters
> > >
> > > 5) The changes Lila has pushed for since we started include:
> > >
> > > - Greater focus on quarterly prioritization and a "rolling
roadmap"
> > > rather than a fiscal year view of the world
> > > - Increased emphasis on understanding the needs of different user
> > > personas at all cycles of software development, including through
use
> > > of qualitative and quantitative
methods
> > > - Reducing velocity of user-facing changes (esp. on desktop) to
> > > increase focus on foundations (platform/process improvements) that
> > > ultimately will enable us to move faster and more effectively
> > > - Documenting product development methodology on-wiki and
establishing
> > > a clearer social contract (to
reduce the reliance on RFCs/votes
> > > regarding feature configurations)
> > > - Surveying the needs of current users to more systematically
balance
> > > projects that serve future/new
users vs. projects that serve the
users
> > > we have today
> > > - Improved communication channels for community engagement to make
it
> > > easier to understand what major
projects are currently in
development
> > > and how to provide feedback
> > >
> > > This already means, effectively, that the commitments in the Annual
> > > Plan developed during Sue's time should be taken with a big block of
> > > salt at this point in time -- we're slowing down the deployment (not
> > > development) of big user-facing features like Flow and VE as much as
> > > needed to ensure that we incorporate user feedback, data and
> > > qualitative research into the product development process
> > > appropriately and spend sufficient time on the technical foundations
> > > for these projects.
> > >
> > > The quarterly prioritization alone has been, IMO, a huge improvement
> > > that's already paying off. In the "Annual Plan" view of the
world,
> > > it's unlikely that we would have prioritized a project like HHVM the
> > > way we did, because we were generally stuck on the priorities set
for
> > > the whole year. But it was very
clear that this project would
provide
> > > huge benefits to our users, and
I'm glad we were able to call it out
> > > as _the_ top priority for Q1 and give the team the space to really
> > > focus on getting it done (almost there now, starting to serve reader
> > > traffic [4]).
> > >
> > > Our draft Q2 top priorities (not yet posted on-wiki, but discussed
in
> > > the metrics meeting last week) are
consistent with the above, with
the
> > > main user-facing push being on
mobile web/apps and editing
> > > performance, while the other priorities are more
> > > platform/process-related. Once again, we're continuing to work on
VE /
> > > Flow, but focusing more on
fundamentals (performance, architecture,
> > > testing, use case analysis, etc.) than accelerating deployments.
> > >
> > > My focus over the coming days is to flesh out the details for the Q2
> > > priorities, and then shift to putting more effort in documenting and
> > > refining product development methodologies and processes on-wiki.
On
> > > the engineering side, there's
plenty of process/infrastructure
> > > improvement to do as well. From my point of view, continued
> > > improvement to test coverage and CI/testing infrastructure,
developer
> > > tools, profiling/instrumentation,
staged roll-out support and
> > > strengthening of architectural leadership are the big pieces for
> > > coming months, but I'll let Damon speak to his focus areas as he
gets
> > > the lay of the land.
> > >
> > > Erik
> > >
> > > [1]
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Sue_Gardner/Narrowing_focus
> > > [2]
> > >
> >
>
https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimedia-l/2012-November/122663.html
> > > [3]
> > >
> >
>
https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimedia-l/2012-December/123088.html
> > > [4]
https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/165004/
> > > --
> > > Erik Möller
> > > VP of Product & Strategy, Wikimedia Foundation
> > >
> > > _______________________________________________
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