On Tue, Sep 28, 2010 at 8:43 PM, MZMcBride z@mzmcbride.com wrote:
Nobody seems to have replied to this thread in about a week, which I think indicates a problem, so I'm gonna poke a bit here.
Rob Lanphier wrote:
As you probably know, we're trying to get into the habit of providing a monthly overview of all WMF-sponsored engineering activity. The September update was posted to the techblog here: http://techblog.wikimedia.org/2010/09/wmf-engineering/
I think these updates are fantastic. And I think there's been some very real forward progress over the past month, in a lot of tech-related areas.
Excellent!
(I don't completely understand why Wikimedia needs two blogs, but that's a matter for a different day.)
It probably doesn't hurt to have a place for us to nerd out and not have to worry about writing for a general audience. It seems that occasionally having some sort of "best of the techblog"-type summary posting on the main blog would be a good thing to do, but that means someone would have to decide what "best" is, and then write about it, so it's probably not something that will happen soon.
For October, we'd like to draft this in public so as to get the information out a little sooner, and to give you all the opportunity to help out. Here's where we're drafting this: http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/WMF_Engineering_Overview_October_2010
There's been no activity on that page since September 23 (a few hours after this thread was started). It's nearly October 1. To me, that indicates a problem.
Funny story there. Most of us EPMs here have been talking daily about wanting to make sure we have some prose in place before our drafting session tomorrow, the same way people talk about losing weight or cleaning out their garage. That's the bad news. The good news is that we have scheduled a drafting session tomorrow that we'll be hammering out a draft.
The drafting session tomorrow isn't going to be public, but maybe future ones will be. Baby steps.
Here's a very simple way you can help. If you see something on the list that you're interested in, but don't see the status for yet, ping one of us, then be bold and add what you learn to the appropriate wiki page. If you do know the status, by all means add it.
Another useful thing to do: you'll notice that many of the project pages that the status post links to are pretty sparse. Same rules apply there. We'd love to get help keeping this up to date.
The current reality is that the paid developers/sysadmins have been isolated from the community. You seem to be essentially asking people to guess or make-up the current status of a lot of these projects, most of which aren't even known about outside paid developers/sysadmins (the Virginia data center, improved ops monitoring, etc.).
Right now, there's such a hard line between community projects and WMF projects that you're right, it's going to be hard for community members to hit the ground running on a WMF project, be it as a developer or as someone trying to document progress. I'm hoping that over time as the newer members of the WMF staff get better at hybrid projects, it'll also be easier for everyone to participate in this activity.
The operations section might be a bit of an exception (obviously a good portion of the user base is familiar with the Pending Changes trial, for example), but in a lot of these areas, only a small number of people know the actual, current status. Everyone else can either guess (and then rely on Cunningham's Law[1]) or leave the page alone (which seems to be the option that most people are taking).
I put the invitation out there in hopes that something would happen, but not counting on it. Ask not, get not. However, it was also an implicit invitation to tell us why it won't work, so thanks for taking the bait :)
Wikimedia has been having weekly (or fortnightly) status meetings about most of the items you listed on MediaWiki.org, but the notes are being held on Wikimedia's installation of EtherPad. Either document this EtherPad installation (I'm not even sure if the URL is supposed to be public, so I'll omit it here) or stop using it and post all of the notes directly on MediaWiki.org. These notes in EtherPad are (by far) the most up-to-date and helpful pages for tracking the status of projects that I've seen, but I doubt more than a dozen people outside of Wikimedia Foundation staff have any idea they exist. Though, perhaps a bit ironically, I haven't seen (m)any ops-related notes on EtherPad, as far as I remember, so that still might be an area in which only one or two people can give an accurate update.
I think our dream tool would be EtherPad realtime capabilities built into MediaWiki.
Again, I think the progress over the past month has been great, and I mean that. People are opening up a bit, some secret (or "secret") channels are being deprecated, code review is starting to pick up, and there are some great, necessary status updates on this list and foundation-l regarding projects that users care about.
Thank you for this encouragement! It is a source of quite a bit of handwringing, and we all know we've still got a lot of work to do.
However, if you want people to get involved in maintaining these blog posts, they need to have access to the necessary resources. And even then, you'll probably still need some sort of incentive for people to work on these. Most companies and organizations use a paycheck, but perhaps in Wikimedia's case, something simple like giving the primary contributor(s) the blog post byline would push people into action.
I have been mulling the incentives. I definitely want to at least acknowledge and thank that contribute somehow. I'm not sure exactly how to translate that from edit history to a sensible byline. That was actually the low point on the last update, since I really didn't acknowledge Tomasz', Alolita's, and Danese's role in writing it (though that was implicit in listing the EPM associated with each).
I'm pretty biased toward figuring out intrinsic reward rather than trying to bolt on external reward. For example, one of the reasons why I edit Wikipedia is because I'll look up something, *not* find the answer, find it somewhere else, and then want to make sure I know where to find the answer again.
I'm hoping we can figure out the various intrinic reasons why people would want to chip in on this type of activity, and make sure we reinforce those.
Another idea is to work with the "Signpost"; these people are already pushing out a tech report weekly and have been doing so for years.
My hope is that a lot of this work is complementary to Signpost and other sources. Part of making the drafting process public is to give Signpost the opportunity to scoop us.
Thanks for digging this email out of the archive and responding! Look for more from us tomorrow.
Rob