Hi Ryan,
Thanks for the information and good luck with your team building itself and getting down to business.
Philosophically, it would be interesting to hear how the team will be addressing issues at a sister-community development level.
Traditionally, there has been the apparent focus on tools for the Wikipedias (and one can see how that happens), so it would be interesting to hear how you will be lifting your focus to the broader wikimedia wiki issues. This is especially important as sometimes decisions made for the Wikipedias have an unexpected adverse impact on the sister wikis. A recent example would be the recent categories to recent changes/watchlists where it was premature in its release due to its impacts outside of the WPs. I know that the sister wikis are smaller and slower in responding to developments, so it would be great to see how we can utilise the available tools like beta. Similarly, how the community-tech team can may be lead in helping those of us outside of the WP-hub to get our needs aligned within the broader WMF scope.
Regards, Billinghurst
On Wed, 26 Aug 2015 05:54 Ryan Kaldari <rkaldari@wikimedia.org> wrote:
Hi everyone!
Community Tech will be dealing a lot with technology relevant to Wikimedia editors. We figured we'd introduce ourselves here, hoping some of you might want to help out connecting us with the communities.
We're a new team within the Wikimedia Foundation, focused on meeting the needs of active Wikimedia editors for improved, expert-focused curation and moderation tools. Making the lives of the people who spend a lot of time taking care of the Wikimedia projects a little bit easier. This is a small team: myself, Frances Hocutt and Niharika Kohli, with some support from Johan Jönsson as a Community Liaison. We'll focus on tasks that can be dealt with quickly and that will have a direct benefit for the core community and might be overlooked by the larger WMF development teams.
To find our feet, we’ve mainly been knocking out bugs during the first weeks. At the moment, we're looking at tasks from previous surveys to see how we can benefit the communities. We are also working on developing a good process for soliciting new requests from the Wikimedians we're responsible for helping. As part of this effort, we have written up a draft proposal (https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Community_Tech_team/Community_Wishlist_Survey) for a cross-project community wishlist survey that we would like to launch within the next month or two. Please take a look at the draft, share it with your communities, and let us know your thoughts on the talk page.
You can find more information, such as the scope of the team, a roadmap, what we're doing and what we've done so far on our team page:
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Community_Tech_teamRyan Kaldari
Engineering Manager, Community Tech
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