Hello all,

I have put the question in the general talk page at nl-wiki: https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:De_kroeg#Feedback_van_lokale_gemeens...

Several reactions came on that: * users experience Bugzilla as unfriendly, and rather use w wiki page for bugs. * other users do not know where to put their questions and problems.

* users want technicians be more visible and better reachable.

* one user had been searching for a technician to help for a year long and couldn't find one.

I try to fullfill my role as ambassador between tech and local users of Dutch projects. I do have a bit more feeling with Bugzilla, and what I try is to translate bugs to Bugzilla. On the Dutch Wikipedia we have a technical discussion room ( https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:SHEIC ), we will transform that page to one where people can add their bugs and problems. In this way we hope to help users better to solve problems/bugs directly (often personal preferences, already known bugs, error in template or just the outlook of a page messed up by inserted code, etc).

I think a lot of the communication can and should be picked up by local users with enough technical knowledge and experience to help in that local language.

Greetings - Romaine

Date: Fri, 7 Dec 2012 17:03:52 +0100 From: Guillaume Paumier gpaumier@wikimedia.org To: "Coordination of technology deployments across languages/projects"     wikitech-ambassadors@lists.wikimedia.org Subject: [Wikitech-ambassadors] Local discussions about how to improve     communication between users and developers Message-ID:     CAHLKNV2TjuwnryCqODj2oYRE6nX2H+4R+=1su2dxMxzYdHDh6Q@mail.gmail.com Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8

Greetings,

Summary: I'm trying to get comments and ideas on how to improve communication between developers and Wikimedia editors, and I'd like to ask the help of people on this list to ask your local communities what they think, and post the results of those discussions here.

Longer version:

Communication between Wikimedia contributors and "tech people" (primarily MediaWiki developers, but also designers and other engineers) hasn't always been ideal. In recent years, Wikimedia employees have made efforts to become more transparent, but what I'd like to discuss today is how we can better engage in true collaboration and 2-way discussion, not just reports and announcements. It's easy to post a link to a new feature that's already been implemented, and tell users "Please provide feedback!". It's much more difficult to truly collaborate every step of the way, from the early planning to deployment.

Some "big" tech projects sponsored by the Wikimedia Foundation are lucky enough to have a Community Liaison who can spend a lot of time discussing with editors, basically incarnating this 2-way communication channel between users and engineering staff. But one person can only do so much: they have to focus on a handful of features, and primarily discusses with the English Wikipedia community. We want to be able to do this for dozens of engineering projects with hundreds of wikis, in many languages, and truly collaborate to build new features together. Hiring hundreds of Community Liaisons isn't really a viable option.

There are probably things in the way we do tech stuff (e.g. new software features and deployments) that drive editors insane. You probably have lots of ideas about what the ideal situation should be, and how to get there: What can the developer community (staff and volunteers) do to get there? (in the short term, medium term, long term?) What can users do to get there?

Instead of just postulating that "The problem is X" and "The solution is obviously Y", I've started an extensive consultation process to learn from users, to hear you, to listen to your complaints and your ideas on how to fix the issues. I'm hoping that this open and collaborative thinking process will yield better results than a one-sided analysis.

An preliminary consultation took place last month with projects in English and French. I've summarized the initial findings and proposals: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Technical_communications/Fall_2012_consultati...

I'm hoping that we can now expand this consultation to more projects and more languages, with your help. It isn't feasible for me to launch a discussion on each wiki in each language, but I'm hoping that you can help me spread this message and start those discussions with your local communities.

I realize this will take some of your time, but I think it's worth spending a little time to discuss this now in order to make big improvements later on how we communicate with each other.

I'm available to answer comments, concerns and questions.

Many thanks for your help!

-- Guillaume Paumier Technical Communications Manager ? Wikimedia Foundation https://donate.wikimedia.org