On 06/29/2013 10:23 PM, sankarshan wrote:
On Sat, Jun 29, 2013 at 3:09 PM, sankarshan foss.mailinglists@gmail.com wrote:
On Sat, Jun 29, 2013 at 5:09 AM, Sumana Harihareswara sumanah@wikimedia.org wrote:
- Growing Tech Ambassadors membership, to improve two-way communication
between developers and users
Where is the overlap in goals and activities to achieving the goals when put in context of regional efforts like CIS/A2K in India (as an example)?
And, my question was in context of http://cis-india.org/openness/resources/access-to-knowledge-work-plan and, the goals that you've mentioned.
-- sankarshan mukhopadhyay https://twitter.com/#!/sankarshan
Sankarshan, thanks for the question, and my apologies on the delay in reply.
As I see it, there are two main ways that our group's goals interact with the efforts of other movement bodies and regional efforts: *capacity-building* and *helping fulfill specific aims*.
We all want to improve the capacity of the movement as a whole to understand technical questions, contribute requests for features and bugfixes, translate among languages and between geekspeak and accessible language, and so on. So, for instance, we might ask CIS and other movement bodies whether the weekly "Tech News" summary https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Tech/News is useful to them, ask them how it could be made more useful, and so on. I also hope that the Wikimedia Chapters Association will be helpful in this kind of feedback and "signal-boosting." Guillaume Paumier has been working on that kind of relationship-building and community-building, and will be picking that up more once the VE rollout stops requiring so much of his attention. :)
Second: ECT is available to help when individuals or communities are trying to figure out how to fulfill specific desires for functionality. Andre Klapper as bug wrangler is a key point of contact here, and has nurtured two-way communication between developers and users through presence in Village Pumps and so on. In the case of A2K I presume we'd be less needed because I think A2K's technical needs fall mostly within the Language team's remit, and they have their own dedicated Outreach Coordinator, Runa Bhattacharjee. But our continuing availability in bug management is one of our four main activities: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Platform_Engineering#Engineering_Co... And when any of us hear of a Wikimedia community needing some technical assistance, we try to connect them with technologists who can help.
While ECT doesn't want to be unnecessarily duplicating any efforts of regional or thematic entities such as CIS/A2K, I'm sure sometimes we'll overlap or work together on similar aims. But as of right now, ECT does not have any specific plans to do so in the next year -- except that of course we'll help chapters with running the spring hackathon and the Wikimania developer days.
I hope that helps! Thanks again.