On 9/7/10 11:23 PM, Robert Leverington wrote:
I find it difficult to believe that this is all the discussion that is going on, or is everything else in face to face meetings - if so where are the minutes and notes for these, because MediaWiki.org seems the obvious place to put them? And furthermore where is all the project documentation that you say has been produced?
For my work specifically (which isn't even of much interest to the dev community), you can find it documented and discussed at: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/CentralNotice_upgrades http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:CentralNotice/Phase_2 http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:CentralNotice/Phase_3 http://techblog.wikimedia.org/2010/09/wmf-engineering/#more-1006
And most of those features are discussed in individual Bugzilla requests.
This may well be true for the community in general, but this discussion is specifically about the volunteer developer community, which is clearly being left out of the loop in a large respect - otherwise this discussion would not exist.
I agree that the volunteer dev community is not as in-the-loop as paid staff, but it's not because the Foundation is trying to keep them out of the loop. Communicating with the dev community, the broader community, fellow staff, and keeping up with an aggressive development schedule is not an easy task! It doesn't take a conspiracy to not satisfactorily fulfill all of those requirements. Obviously, we can stand some improvement, which is why the Foundation is planning on specifically hiring someone to act as a bugmeister and development coordinator in the very near future. What we need are helpful (and realistic) suggestions for how to improve communication, not misguided badgering about "secret channels".
Ryan Kaldari