For what is worth, nobody at the WMF is suggesting any kind of Architecture Committee discrimination or promotion based on affiliation. Can we please discuss the idea of nominating architects per area? Is there any good reason not to do it?
Yesterday I had a chance to speak with Tim, trying to get a specific action for the Engineering Community team in the middle of this dense and complex topic. So here is a simple one:
Create a high level overview of the MediaWiki architecture https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T1287
Your feedback and help is welcome. There are two possible ways of approaching this:
1. experts defining a list of core areas and key extensions 2. non-experts doing the same and upsetting the experts, who step in
If 1 doesn't work, I'll advocate for 2, with a risk of starting with the list myself. :) Please don't let me.
On Thu, Jan 22, 2015 at 7:31 PM, MZMcBride z@mzmcbride.com wrote:
Mark A. Hershberger wrote:
I am not qualified for the ArchCom, but I am familiar with several engineers working in government or running private wiki farms or their own businesses who I think would be qualified.
Another qualification I'd look for is substantial Wikimedia community involvement. Architecting requires a very thorough understanding of who you're building for. (I recently raised this same issue on the design mailing list related to editing Wikipedia... I think it's very difficult to build great tools for a community that you're not a part of.)
Thankfully, we have lots of good candidates who are both brilliant and understand Wikimedia (Domas, Magnus, and Platonides come to mind off-hand).
The trickier part of having non-employees on a committee like this is that other people won't be getting paid to participate and may not have as much time to commit as a result. It's still a bit unclear to me how much work is involved on a weekly basis. If it's just an hour-long IRC session, that's a lot different than needing ten hours or more every week.
MZMcBride
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