Hi,
On 10/6/22 00:36, Linh Nguyen wrote:
In the spirit of the Wikimedia Movement Strategy, to
be inclusive and
support open knowledge, I applaud everyone to reach out to others in our
community to help and support those who are not as fortunate to have the
skills and knowledge you have. We should be lifting each other up and
stop pushing others down for trying to help the community.
I think it is patently unfair to describe Brian's email as "pushing
others down". It is an absolutely fair critique of the *TDF* to ask why
they are appointing members who appear to have no experience in
Wikimedia technical spaces. This is not a commentary on the people who
applied, but rather the TDF process.
If anyone out there is willing to contribute to the
Technical
Decision Forum process, please add your name to the list
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Technical_decision_making/Community_rep_nomination>.
I am fine with saying the quiet part out loud. Most volunteer developers
aren't interested in participating in the TDF because it treats them as
second-class participants. Contrasting to TechCom, which for all its
faults at least had public meetings that volunteers could participate in
as equals, the implementation of the TDF literally left volunteers as an
afterthought.
At this point joining the TDF would only add the appearance of
legitimacy to a closed, non-transparent system that is antithetical to
Wikimedia development principles.
Brian and everyone else, if you have ideas on how we
can have more
community representation, please feel free to contact us at
TDFsupport(a)wikimedia.org <mailto:TDFsupport@wikimedia.org>. We need to
come together with ideas and solutions and remove negativity from the
process.
The negativity mostly exists because people (WMF staff and volunteers)
having spent months asking questions about TDF composition and decisions
and then were entirely ghosted.
I currently count about 33 out of 40 TDF members being WMF Staff. Over
the past 90 days, only 49.4% of Gerrit patches came from WMF Staff[1].
My straw-dog proposal is that representation should be proportional,
i.e. WMF Staff should make up less than half of the TDF, or whatever
decision-making body replaces it.
[1]
https://wikimedia.biterg.io/
-- Kunal / Legoktm