Thanks Gergő. I think that what I am seeking occupies a middle ground between Tech News and and the quarterly check-ins. Quarterly check-ins can have lengthy slide decks which are wonderfully detailed but require considerable time to read. Tech news is less comprehensive than the type of resource that I am seeking. The Discovery / Search Platform newsletters are great but they are also more detailed than I need on a per-team basis.
I'll use some vocabulary from baseball in trying to describe the info that I would like to see from each Audiences and Technology team each week:
LAST PLAY: activities that were completed last week, such as "We completed planning of deployment for desktop beta of Wikistats 2.1. Hiring of new dev and DBA was finalized; their first day of work is two weeks out. Fixed a regression that caused an unplanned failover (Phabricator task link here); service is back to normal."
AT BAT: highlights of current activities that are happening prior to the release of the next weekly update, such as "This week we are deploying the desktop beta of Wikistats 2.1 (Phabricator task link here) and we are working with Research to improve API documentation. Work on the incident report for last week's unplanned failover (link to document here) is continuing."
ON DECK: activities that are planned for the next 1 to 2 weeks after the completion of the "at bat" activities, such as "Survey of needs for API users is in final design and awaiting sign-offs (Phabricator task link here); staff onboarding for new dev and DBA; IRC office hour to discuss the beta desktop Wikistats 2.1".
IN THE HOLE: highlights of activities that are 2 to 6 weeks away. Such as "Budget planning associated with Annual Planning; early design of the mobile interface for Wikistats 2.1 (Phabricator task link here); planning of documentation (Phabricator task link here) and test methodology (Phabricator task link here) for mobile Wikistats 2.1; staff cross-training".
My guess is that there are routine internal meetings where this information is discussed. I would like for information at approximately this level of detail to be published, with allowance for redactions of security and privacy sensitive information.
Is there interest from others in publishing or reading information like this? My guess is that other people might also benefit from reports like these, including people at WMF who might want to know what other teams are doing, but if no one else is interested then I'll try to go along with the status quo.
Pine ( https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Pine )
On Fri, Jan 11, 2019 at 8:04 PM Gergő Tisza gtisza@gmail.com wrote:
On Fri, Jan 11, 2019 at 11:29 AM Pine W wiki.pine@gmail.com wrote:
[...] Are there any upcoming plans for systematic study or development of WMF-to-public communications processes from Audiences and Technology?
Not quite the same thing, but touches on communication:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Growth_and_diversity_of_Technology_...
There are a couple existing ways to learn about new developments, though. There is Tech News (focused on immediate user-facing changes), quarterly department checkins (focused on the big picture and progress of annual plan goals and other large projects), most teams have a monthly or sometimes weekly newsletter and/or on-wiki updates page, there are some regular showcases (research and more recently language), and people write blog posts about larger or more interesting developments on Phabricator and the WMF blog. (The discoverability of all of these things could certainly be improved.) And if you are sufficiently interested in a specific team, team Phabricator boards are public.
On Fri, Jan 11, 2019 at 11:29 AM Pine W wiki.pine@gmail.com wrote:
On Fri, Jan 11, 2019, 9:31 AM Dan Garry (Deskana) djgwiki@gmail.com wrote:
On Wed, 9 Jan 2019 at 20:25, Pine W wiki.pine@gmail.com wrote:
I would like to request that every Audiences and Technology team
submit
highlights of recent and upcoming activities for inclusion in every
set
of
SoS notes, even if no one personally attends the SoS meeting from a particular team, so that readers of these notes can keep better track
of
what is happening in the Audiences and Technology departments and so
that
readers can make adjustments to our own plans as needed.
Scrum of scrums meetings are intended to be a venue for development
teams
to surface upcoming blockers and dependencies on other teams, so that
teams
can better work together and not block each other. Scrum of scrums
meetings
are not intended to be a forum for general announcements about
activities
by end-users. These are very different use cases with different target audiences.
I understand your concerns about visibility of the actions inside the Wikimedia Foundation. It's certainly difficult to see things from the outside. That said, taking a meeting with a well-defined purpose and objective, and expanding that objective to add an additional, quite different use case, is not good practice; doing so may cause people to disengage or lose focus, thereby meaning the original objective of the meeting is no longer met.
Some reading you might find useful:
Dan
Hi Dan,
That is helpful. Perhaps the info I am seeking would be better
communicated
in a different way. I am reluctant to request a new communications
process
that would require nontrivial effort to start and to maintain if I am the only one who is interested. Are there any upcoming plans for systematic study or development of WMF-to-public communications processes from Audiences and Technology? If so, perhaps I could have a conversation with whomever will work on that communications effort.
Pine ( https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Pine )
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