Hi Victoria, I hope that you are OK with discussing this announcement on Wikimedia-l, which seems to me to be the most applicable mailing list for my questions. I have two questions and one comment.
I think that I understand the desires here. However, it is unfortunate that a likely side effect of this scheduling is an increase in total costs and time spent traveling for those who will attend this conference and WMF All Hands, and additional costs from the lengthening of the All Hands conference. Since there are so many options for remote collaboration for WMF staff for follow up to All Hands discussions, and the additional costs for these combined changes sound likely to be in the tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars, I am less than enthusiastic about this aspect. Can you explain the cost-benefit analysis further, and why remote collaboration options at much lower cost are inadequate for extending the conversations from All Hands? Please ensure that the dates for this conference don't conflict with Wiki Conference North America. The cap of 50 participants, as stated on the MediaWiki page, seems to me to be low given the stated goals of the conference. Have you considered a higher cap? Thanks, Pine ( https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Pine ) -------- Original message --------From: Victoria Coleman vcoleman@wikimedia.org Date: 4/2/18 4:46 PM (GMT-08:00) To: "Staff (All)" wmfall@lists.wikimedia.org, MediaWiki announcements and site admin list mediawiki-l@lists.wikimedia.org Subject: [MediaWiki-l] Announcing the Wikimedia Technical Conference Hi everyone.
This is a time of important change for technology and the Wikimedia movement. We are evolving our platform to better support, grow, and prepare the movement for the future to realize our strategic goals of Knowledge as a Service and Knowledge Equity.
Our vision is to host a different type of event in 2018 — to make informed decisions in the evolution of our platform while building our technical community engagement and enhancing our product vision. We want to be able to gather and discuss to determine our future direction and that of our shared platform; to communicate more broadly our product vision and to build a solid and stable base for our volunteer developer community. Future years will have have different focuses and themes.
We also want to learn from our experiences during previous technically oriented events to improve our focus, enhance outcomes, and to give ourselves the time and space to have informed, substantive, and timely conversations — this all starts with the overall theme of the event.
The January 2018 Developer Summit (in Berkeley, California) event had a broad goal to look at ways that technology can support our strategic direction. A concrete outcome of those discussions was acknowledging the need to evolve our core platform for the road ahead. In light of that outcome, we will hold future events with themes that reflect our evolving priorities and opportunities to support and enhance the Wikimedia movement with technology. Therefore, our next technical event will be focused on Platform Evolution.
We will hold a 4 day conference with topics that pertain to the Platform Evolution goals that we want to achieve in the next 3 to 5 years with a shared understanding of the product vision around those goals while also enhancing technical engagement within the Foundation and embracing and empowering our large community of volunteer developers.
Day 1: Product driven discussions on the how’s and why’s of our shared goals. Day 2 & 3: A deep dive into specific technical ideas, concerns, and outcomes around the newly formed Platform Evolution cross-departmental program. Day 4: An unconference / ‘get stuff done’ format along with sessions on building and sustaining our developer community.
We are also moving the time of year that we’ll hold this new event. The previously established timeframe had been in January, typically adjacent to the annual Foundation All Hands gathering, to allow for co-location of events. However, feedback from both the DevSummit and All Hands participants indicates that both events need more time to accomplish their goals. All Hands is a once-a-year event that many teams use to come together, face to face, for working meetings; as well as the entire Foundation getting together for meetings. Going forward, we will decouple the DevSummit from All Hands, to give both gatherings the time and space that all attendees need to be productive and successful.
This first of the event series will take place in Q2 of our fiscal year 2018-2019, in October 2018, and will be held in Portland, OR, USA. This timing was chosen to give us the opportunity to formulate plans, proposals, and programs in time for the Foundation annual planning cycle which starts in January 2019.
Since we have a new focus and want to expand upon the successes of the Developer Summit events from years past — we will now call this gathering of like-minded technologists the Wikimedia Technical Conference (WM TechCon). Stay tuned for more information on the formation of the program committee and the participant’s selection process, as we are making quite a few changes based on the feedback collected from previous events.
Make sure to follow the event’s mediawiki page https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Technical_Conference/2018 for more details.
Best wishes,
Victoria Coleman
Chief Technology Officer Wikimedia Foundation 1 Montgomery Street, Suite 1600 San Francisco, CA 94104
+1-650-703-8112
vcoleman@wikimedia.org
_______________________________________________ MediaWiki-l mailing list To unsubscribe, go to: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mediawiki-l
Thanks for pointing that out Pine. I believe WikiConference North America will be on October 18 to 22 in Columbus, Ohio.
On Tue, Apr 3, 2018 at 10:41 AM, Pine W wiki.pine@gmail.com wrote:
Hi Victoria, I hope that you are OK with discussing this announcement on Wikimedia-l, which seems to me to be the most applicable mailing list for my questions. I have two questions and one comment.
I think that I understand the desires here. However, it is unfortunate that a likely side effect of this scheduling is an increase in total costs and time spent traveling for those who will attend this conference and WMF All Hands, and additional costs from the lengthening of the All Hands conference. Since there are so many options for remote collaboration for WMF staff for follow up to All Hands discussions, and the additional costs for these combined changes sound likely to be in the tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars, I am less than enthusiastic about this aspect. Can you explain the cost-benefit analysis further, and why remote collaboration options at much lower cost are inadequate for extending the conversations from All Hands? Please ensure that the dates for this conference don't conflict with Wiki Conference North America. The cap of 50 participants, as stated on the MediaWiki page, seems to me to be low given the stated goals of the conference. Have you considered a higher cap? Thanks, Pine ( https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Pine ) -------- Original message --------From: Victoria Coleman < vcoleman@wikimedia.org> Date: 4/2/18 4:46 PM (GMT-08:00) To: "Staff (All)" wmfall@lists.wikimedia.org, MediaWiki announcements and site admin list mediawiki-l@lists.wikimedia.org Subject: [MediaWiki-l] Announcing the Wikimedia Technical Conference Hi everyone.
This is a time of important change for technology and the Wikimedia movement. We are evolving our platform to better support, grow, and prepare the movement for the future to realize our strategic goals of Knowledge as a Service and Knowledge Equity.
Our vision is to host a different type of event in 2018 — to make informed decisions in the evolution of our platform while building our technical community engagement and enhancing our product vision. We want to be able to gather and discuss to determine our future direction and that of our shared platform; to communicate more broadly our product vision and to build a solid and stable base for our volunteer developer community. Future years will have have different focuses and themes.
We also want to learn from our experiences during previous technically oriented events to improve our focus, enhance outcomes, and to give ourselves the time and space to have informed, substantive, and timely conversations — this all starts with the overall theme of the event.
The January 2018 Developer Summit (in Berkeley, California) event had a broad goal to look at ways that technology can support our strategic direction. A concrete outcome of those discussions was acknowledging the need to evolve our core platform for the road ahead. In light of that outcome, we will hold future events with themes that reflect our evolving priorities and opportunities to support and enhance the Wikimedia movement with technology. Therefore, our next technical event will be focused on Platform Evolution.
We will hold a 4 day conference with topics that pertain to the Platform Evolution goals that we want to achieve in the next 3 to 5 years with a shared understanding of the product vision around those goals while also enhancing technical engagement within the Foundation and embracing and empowering our large community of volunteer developers.
Day 1: Product driven discussions on the how’s and why’s of our shared goals. Day 2 & 3: A deep dive into specific technical ideas, concerns, and outcomes around the newly formed Platform Evolution cross-departmental program. Day 4: An unconference / ‘get stuff done’ format along with sessions on building and sustaining our developer community.
We are also moving the time of year that we’ll hold this new event. The previously established timeframe had been in January, typically adjacent to the annual Foundation All Hands gathering, to allow for co-location of events. However, feedback from both the DevSummit and All Hands participants indicates that both events need more time to accomplish their goals. All Hands is a once-a-year event that many teams use to come together, face to face, for working meetings; as well as the entire Foundation getting together for meetings. Going forward, we will decouple the DevSummit from All Hands, to give both gatherings the time and space that all attendees need to be productive and successful.
This first of the event series will take place in Q2 of our fiscal year 2018-2019, in October 2018, and will be held in Portland, OR, USA. This timing was chosen to give us the opportunity to formulate plans, proposals, and programs in time for the Foundation annual planning cycle which starts in January 2019.
Since we have a new focus and want to expand upon the successes of the Developer Summit events from years past — we will now call this gathering of like-minded technologists the Wikimedia Technical Conference (WM TechCon). Stay tuned for more information on the formation of the program committee and the participant’s selection process, as we are making quite a few changes based on the feedback collected from previous events.
Make sure to follow the event’s mediawiki page https://www.mediawiki.org/ wiki/Wikimedia_Technical_Conference/2018 for more details.
Best wishes,
Victoria Coleman
Chief Technology Officer Wikimedia Foundation 1 Montgomery Street, Suite 1600 San Francisco, CA 94104
+1-650-703-8112
vcoleman@wikimedia.org
MediaWiki-l mailing list To unsubscribe, go to: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mediawiki-l _______________________________________________ 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 Pine, thank you for your feedback. Some responses inline below:
On Apr 3, 2018, at 7:41 AM, Pine W wiki.pine@gmail.com wrote:
Hi Victoria, I hope that you are OK with discussing this announcement on Wikimedia-l, which seems to me to be the most applicable mailing list for my questions. I have two questions and one comment.
I think that I understand the desires here. However, it is unfortunate that a likely side effect of this scheduling is an increase in total costs and time spent traveling for those who will attend this conference and WMF All Hands, and additional costs from the lengthening of the All Hands conference. Since there are so many options for remote collaboration for WMF staff for follow up to All Hands discussions, and the additional costs for these combined changes sound likely to be in the tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars, I am less than enthusiastic about this aspect. Can you explain the cost-benefit analysis further,
Our aim is to keep the travel costs flat from year to year. For Wikimedia Foundation's engineering teams, other events to be taken into account in this equation are the Wikimedia Hackathon and separate team offsites. The extended AllHands in January 2019 will allow for more team offsites co-located, being both types of events Wikimedia Foundation internal. Participation in the Hackathon and the Tech Conference (both events open to Wikimedians and third parties) is expected to be more balanced. We believe that this combination will allow us to participate at the WMF & teams AllHands, the Tech Conference and the Hackathon in more focused and consistent ways, getting better results from each event.
and why remote collaboration options at much lower cost are inadequate for extending the conversations from All Hands?
Remote collaboration is our default way of working. Most if not all engineering teams are partially or totally remote, and their day to day communications are based on chats, hangouts and asynchronous conversations. We believe that adding a few more days around these events for face to face interaction will result in much better understanding and decisions around the many complex problems that our current plans and our future strategy is demanding us to solve.
Please ensure that the dates for this conference don't conflict with Wiki Conference North America.
I believe there is overlap of one day between the two events. On the other hand, the participation in each of these events has almost no overlap, according to the data from past editions.
The cap of 50 participants, as stated on the MediaWiki page, seems to me to be low given the stated goals of the conference. Have you considered a higher cap?
Yes, and we discarded it. We are serious about keeping travel costs flat, and this is achieved through decisions like this one. In previous versions, the Developer Summit has increased online participation before, during, and after the event. This cap of 50 participants is necessary from a budget point of view, but it also contributes to tighter collaboration and results assuming that these participants represent a critical mass of stakeholders in the subjects discussed. We are planning to improve the dynamics and impact of online participation open to anyone prior to the event (see Outcome 4 and its related outputs in our International Developer Events program https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Technical_Collaboration/Annual_Plan_2018-19#International_developer_events).
Thanks, Pine ( https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Pine ) -------- Original message --------From: Victoria Coleman vcoleman@wikimedia.org Date: 4/2/18 4:46 PM (GMT-08:00) To: "Staff (All)" wmfall@lists.wikimedia.org, MediaWiki announcements and site admin list mediawiki-l@lists.wikimedia.org Subject: [MediaWiki-l] Announcing the Wikimedia Technical Conference Hi everyone.
This is a time of important change for technology and the Wikimedia movement. We are evolving our platform to better support, grow, and prepare the movement for the future to realize our strategic goals of Knowledge as a Service and Knowledge Equity.
Our vision is to host a different type of event in 2018 — to make informed decisions in the evolution of our platform while building our technical community engagement and enhancing our product vision. We want to be able to gather and discuss to determine our future direction and that of our shared platform; to communicate more broadly our product vision and to build a solid and stable base for our volunteer developer community. Future years will have have different focuses and themes.
We also want to learn from our experiences during previous technically oriented events to improve our focus, enhance outcomes, and to give ourselves the time and space to have informed, substantive, and timely conversations — this all starts with the overall theme of the event.
The January 2018 Developer Summit (in Berkeley, California) event had a broad goal to look at ways that technology can support our strategic direction. A concrete outcome of those discussions was acknowledging the need to evolve our core platform for the road ahead. In light of that outcome, we will hold future events with themes that reflect our evolving priorities and opportunities to support and enhance the Wikimedia movement with technology. Therefore, our next technical event will be focused on Platform Evolution.
We will hold a 4 day conference with topics that pertain to the Platform Evolution goals that we want to achieve in the next 3 to 5 years with a shared understanding of the product vision around those goals while also enhancing technical engagement within the Foundation and embracing and empowering our large community of volunteer developers.
Day 1: Product driven discussions on the how’s and why’s of our shared goals. Day 2 & 3: A deep dive into specific technical ideas, concerns, and outcomes around the newly formed Platform Evolution cross-departmental program. Day 4: An unconference / ‘get stuff done’ format along with sessions on building and sustaining our developer community.
We are also moving the time of year that we’ll hold this new event. The previously established timeframe had been in January, typically adjacent to the annual Foundation All Hands gathering, to allow for co-location of events. However, feedback from both the DevSummit and All Hands participants indicates that both events need more time to accomplish their goals. All Hands is a once-a-year event that many teams use to come together, face to face, for working meetings; as well as the entire Foundation getting together for meetings. Going forward, we will decouple the DevSummit from All Hands, to give both gatherings the time and space that all attendees need to be productive and successful.
This first of the event series will take place in Q2 of our fiscal year 2018-2019, in October 2018, and will be held in Portland, OR, USA. This timing was chosen to give us the opportunity to formulate plans, proposals, and programs in time for the Foundation annual planning cycle which starts in January 2019.
Since we have a new focus and want to expand upon the successes of the Developer Summit events from years past — we will now call this gathering of like-minded technologists the Wikimedia Technical Conference (WM TechCon). Stay tuned for more information on the formation of the program committee and the participant’s selection process, as we are making quite a few changes based on the feedback collected from previous events.
Make sure to follow the event’s mediawiki page https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Technical_Conference/2018 for more details.
Best wishes,
Victoria Coleman
Chief Technology Officer Wikimedia Foundation 1 Montgomery Street, Suite 1600 San Francisco, CA 94104
+1-650-703-8112
vcoleman@wikimedia.org
MediaWiki-l mailing list To unsubscribe, go to: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mediawiki-l _______________________________________________ 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 Victoria,
Thank you very much for the explanations.
I am glad to hear that the net effect of these changes will be that travel costs remain flat. Does that include lodging and per diem costs?
I would suggest collaborating with the WikiConference North America organizers to try to arrange for there to be no overlap between the two conferences. That may be impossible, but I think that it is desirable. To the best of my knowledge, the exact WMCONNA dates have been finalized https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:Conference/WCNA/WikiConference_North_America_2018 while the WMTCON dates have not https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Technical_Conference/2018. Both conferences could be in October but on different weekends so that there would be no overlap.
The WMF Board has not yet adopted the 2018-2019 WMF Annual Plan, which I believe means that the plans for the WMTCON and for the next WMF All Hands Conference are contingent on WMF Board approval of that annual plan. Is that correct?
I would like there to be a policy that every conference which receives WMF funding, including the Wikimedia Conference and All Hands, should go through a WMF Conference and Event Grants process https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:Conference, perhaps with levels of detail and scrutiny that are scaled according to the sizes of budgets and the number of anticipated participants. Even if funding is a foregone conclusion, I think that compelling all conference organizers to do this will help with transparency and to strengthen the planning and evaluation of conferences.
Hi Pine,
Yes, you are correct. The Board has not yet approved the annual plan for next year so our plans for the conference and other programs are contingent on Board approval.
Best regards,
Victoria
On Apr 5, 2018, at 6:56 PM, Pine W wiki.pine@gmail.com wrote:
Hi Victoria,
Thank you very much for the explanations.
I am glad to hear that the net effect of these changes will be that travel costs remain flat. Does that include lodging and per diem costs?
I would suggest collaborating with the WikiConference North America organizers to try to arrange for there to be no overlap between the two conferences. That may be impossible, but I think that it is desirable. To the best of my knowledge, the exact WMCONNA dates have been finalized https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:Conference/WCNA/WikiConference_North_America_2018 while the WMTCON dates have not https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Technical_Conference/2018. Both conferences could be in October but on different weekends so that there would be no overlap.
The WMF Board has not yet adopted the 2018-2019 WMF Annual Plan, which I believe means that the plans for the WMTCON and for the next WMF All Hands Conference are contingent on WMF Board approval of that annual plan. Is that correct?
I would like there to be a policy that every conference which receives WMF funding, including the Wikimedia Conference and All Hands, should go through a WMF Conference and Event Grants process https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:Conference, perhaps with levels of detail and scrutiny that are scaled according to the sizes of budgets and the number of anticipated participants. Even if funding is a foregone conclusion, I think that compelling all conference organizers to do this will help with transparency and to strengthen the planning and evaluation of conferences.
Pine ( https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Pine ) _______________________________________________ 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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