Hello all,
just a quick big picture update:
1) In general, as you may have noticed, Danese has hired Engineering Program Managers. This is a standard way in growing tech organizations to manage, organize and communicate technology projects. The current setup is:
Rob Lanphier - general core engineering (MediaWiki core, API, code review, QA, etc.) Alolita Sharma - features/product engineering Tomasz Finc - fundraising, mobile/offline
Guillaume Paumier is currently doing both product planning and some EPM work for the multimedia usability project.
This has led to much-improved internal planning and organization of WMF's technical projects, and as you've probably seen, a solid general update and documentation of the engineering projects that are underway:
http://techblog.wikimedia.org/2010/09/wmf-engineering/
If you want to keep up with hiring of staff and contractors, there's now also a new Twitter feed:
http://twitter.com/wikimediaatwork
2) My role is shifting to helping articulate our overall product development strategy and research, meaning to synthesize input from many different sources (community, other departments, researchers, etc.) that helps inform our decision as to which projects we either want to build or prioritize. That includes questions such as "Let's take this existing MediaWiki extension and help review it and whip it into shape". To support this work, I will work with one strategically oriented Senior Product Manager (Howie Fung) and a Senior Research Analyst (currently posted).
This, of course, will be primarily relevant to projects we're directly paying for, but also to some extent the kinds of meetings and the types of volunteer projects we'll facilitate and try to actively generate interest in. Ultimately, volunteer developers invest time in projects they care about, but we do not guarantee that every MediaWiki extension will be reviewed, improved or deployed by WMF staff engineers, irrespective of whether there's a large amount of community interest in it or not. (For example, there might be large interest in a feature that's prohibitively complex, or poorly thought out, or very low-impact.)
Indeed, I don't believe in an approach that only relies on user ratings or votes, rather, priorities should be set based on the overall impact on our strategic objectives that any planned project (technology or not) is going to have. Is it going to help our editor community be more effective? Is it going to help us reach more people? Is it going to drive the overall quality of the content? Is it going to support reaching disadvantaged or underrepresented communities?
That said, that doesn't mean that a process can't be open and consultative. I invite you to look at the (permanently open) Call for Proposals on StrategyWiki, and the special extension that's used to show a dashboard of particularly active or interesting proposals:
http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Main_Page
I hope to help kick this process back into gear a little bit, and improve upon it, as a way to solicit more extensive and carefully thought-out proposals than what typically finds its way into Bugzilla. (And I agree that Bugzilla is a great tool, especially for smaller requests.)
Together with Danese, the EPM team, and others, we will aim to make WMF's decisions transparent and understandable. When Danese writes about "making code review more transparent", this is a big part of what she's talking about -- the entire process of deciding, for example, that a community-developed software extension is being reviewed, deployed, and possibly even integrated into MediaWiki core. So we do want to be clear _why_ something happens, even if you might disagree with the reasons.
Last but not least, please bear with us, as we're a) still a small team, b) still generally professionalizing and maturing our engineering practices, c) in active growth and transition mode, meaning we have to absorb and orient lots of new people. We're all here to help Wikimedia succeed, and we appreciate patience, kindness, good faith and good humor in working together.
All best, Erik