I'm still trying to understand why UK-based Wikimedia developer discussions have to be on a closed forum.
As an example, with global discussions around issues or changes on Phabricator, a key benefit is that it is easy to link to these discussions and information on-wiki so that anyone can review them, not just those that have set up accounts on Phabricator. Encouraging wiki-project developers to join an invite-only channel to discuss changes to their open projects behind closed doors, appears to force a contradiction in values and remain an ethical barrier for potential contributors.
At the point where any development might change Wikimedia projects, whatever was done on a closed forum would have to be presented publicly. Even abandoned ideas benefit the community by adding to our store of common knowledge, if the discussions are available for future reference rather than held in closed archives.
Fae
On 17 January 2017 at 14:51, John Lubbock john.lubbock@wikimedia.org.uk wrote:
The other thing is that we have already started using Slack in the office for chat, and I have another slack channel for the Kurdish Wikipedia Project, so I've already gone down this path a bit of a way and to back out and start again because something else is open source would be quite disruptive for other work I'm doing. I'm trying to organise developers to come to one place to discuss this, and I've chosen Slack because it's easy and lots of people use it. I appreciate that it might not be ideal for some people, but I really can't spare the time and effort to start this all again from scratch.
John
On 17 January 2017 at 13:19, Katherine Bavage katherine.bavage@gmail.com wrote:
I'm not planning to join because I don't code (though I'm happy to join a channel if you get to a stage where end user or design process feedback is useful) but I would note that asking people to adopt new platforms 'just because they are open source', rather than ones that are used by a lot of people/ a lot of people are already familiar with, is pretty daft when your ultimate goal is to benefit the open source community through the work the channel fosters.
As far as I know, for this type of work, Slack is the go to for most devs. The Foundation use it without issue.
On Tue, 17 Jan 2017 at 12:24 Gordon Joly gordon.joly@pobox.com wrote:
On 17/01/17 00:38, John Lubbock wrote:
It costs a lot of money, as far as I can see (it says Try for Free and then takes you to a page where it asks you to pay $100 a month).
We wrote Discourse, and we can host it for you, too.
Yes, that is a hosting option. You can download and install for free. I am suggesting WMUK host the code on their own server...
Gordo