+1
I also like this tone and agree both with everything Magnus has claimed and
with Quim's ideas of opening specific Phabricator tasks to move forward. I
think a big problem is how to inform people during product launch. I think
the media viewer would have been launched more smoothly if the viewer had
the "turn this new feature off" button placed more prominently in the first
few weeks of introduction, for logged in users of all kinds, both readers
as well as editors. The main problem there was that the media viewer had a
negative impact on the workflow for many Wiki(p/m)edians, and because there
was no formal study of editor workflows beforehand, this was entirely
overlooked. Readers of maps and other files that use the annotator were
also locked out from that content for a fairly long period of time.
Moving forward, more attention must be paid to documenting existing reader
and editor workflows, gnarly as this may sound to achieve. Once done
however, optimization of such workflows should be much, much easier. After
viewing that video from Mexico Wikimania of a mobile-user's editing
workflow with the Visual Editor I was shocked to think that there are
people out there trying so hard and moving so slowly to achieve their wiki
goals. We really need to spend time on this, because mobile will only
become more and more important. I for one don't see myself making the
switch to Visual Editor any time soon, though I do use several other
websites regularly on mobile.
As far as asking the WMF only to "build what the community wants", I
strongly disagree. I have become a regular user of Facebook to augment my
onwiki work, and a few years ago if you had asked me whether I would find
Wiki(p/m)edians on Facebook I would have said "No Way!"
On Wed, Jan 20, 2016 at 10:36 AM, Pine W <wiki.pine(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Quim,
I like the tone of these proposals.
I particularly like the concepts (some of which you mentioned) of:
* Limited-scale A/B tests in the wild prior to 100% deployments
* Community involvement in the ideation and early product design phases
* Well-designed, short surveys with appropriate sampling (with a nod to
Edward'a possible role here) at various points in product development
* The development and use of SMART goals throughout the product design
process
* "Design thinking" about contributor workflows
Pine
On Jan 20, 2016 1:17 AM, "Quim Gil" <qgil(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:
Thank you for this interesting thread (and thank
you for the interesting
blog post in the first place). I'll pick a quote and I will try to
propose
ways forward about other comments made.
On Mon, Jan 18, 2016 at 11:35 PM, Magnus Manske <
magnusmanske(a)googlemail.com
wrote:
I would hope the Foundation by now understands
better how to handle new
software releases.
I think so, although I'm sure the Foundation still needs to understand
better how to handle new software releases -- and the communities too.
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/WMF_product_development_process is the
common protocol where we want to apply all the learning. Clarifying
how community engagement works in this WMF product development process
is a
main priority for us during this quarter (
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T124022
), and everybody is invited to join.
I do think that we have many problems as software partners, the first
problem being that we all got used to this situation of
confrontation-by-default as something natural, they way it is. We are
software partners, we really are, and in order to make this partnership
productive we need to be in a mood of collaboration-by-default.
We need a climate where new ideas are welcomed and encouraged. Today
someone comes with a new idea and the chances are that the first replies
setting the tone will be more discouraging than encouraging. We need a
safe
and exciting place where everybody can share new
concepts, collaborate on
them, learn from each other.
We need a prioritization process where great concepts receive initial
support for planning and prototyping, and where good plans and prototypes
receive support to start their way toward production. The WMF needs to
open
that process to the participation of our
communities, and our communities
need to understand that this is the best point of time to discuss new
plans.
We need design and build processes that volunteers find easy to follow
and
participate in. There are many and very diverse
groups of people (at
Wikimedia and beyond) that would give their feedback about design
concepts
or alpha releases if they would only know about
them.
We need to make our deployment process more flexible and predictable,
allowing development teams and communities to agree on beta releases, A/B
tests, opt-in/opt-out approaches, first/last waves... Some ideas:
* In order to enter the deployment phase, a project would need to have a
deployment plan proposed, agreed, and documented -- which can be adapted
based on data and feedback gathered.
* For every new product or significant feature, each community could have
the chance to determine whether they want to be early adopters (first
waves) or, on the contrary, be placed in the last waves, after seeing how
the new software is being used by others and is being matured.
* Communities would focus not so much on {{Support}} / {{Oppose}}
decisions
about the totality of a feature, but on the
identification of specific
blockers, allowing development teams to negotiate and change their plans
under clearer terms.
This common protocol should allow us to move away from the current
situation where both communities and development teams fear that a single
strike might disrupt their work overnight, without even seeing it coming.
A more predictable path with specialized checkpoints should allow
communities and development teams understanding better what is going on
and
when to talk about what. It should also help
recruiting more and more
diverse participants, who could contribute their time and skills in more
daring and productive ways.
What makes me optimistic about this common product development process is
that we don't need to finalize all the pieces to make it work. As long as
we agree that we are software partners and we agree that iterations are
good, we can start agreeing on improvements and implement them one by
one.
Get involved, please. You can either join the more theoretical work about
the overall process or you can pick a specific improvement and help
pushing
(where
we have been a bit slow lately but not anymore
now that is a top goal).
--
Quim Gil
Engineering Community Manager @ Wikimedia Foundation
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Qgil
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