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