On Wed, Mar 23, 2016 at 3:18 PM, Moushira Elamrawy melamrawy@wikimedia.org wrote:
...
In fact, we are not sure if an rfc is the best strategy to move forward
with product decisions, but lets see how the discussion evolves, and we might explore the need for a different process, as we move on with this one.
I don't think an RFC on its own is *ever* the best way to move forward with product decisions. From what I've seen, that approach inevitably leads to the conflation of design issues ("does this work as designed, for whom, why or why not?") with implement issues ("do the people who participate in this discussion want this feature to exist on some wiki in some form, why or why not?"). Too often this simply pits the WMF product team, who obviously want feature to be liked and used, against a cohort of community members who *dislike* the feature enough that they're willing to spend their private time slugging it out. Things escalate, mug is thrown, new epithets are coined, and the product--often as not--just continues to hang in limbo.
In future, I would suggest we always conduct some user research first—with editors and readers, to understand what value, if any, different stakeholders find in the product, as well as what's working and what's not in the current design. Then bring the findings of that research into the RFC, to provide an additional set of criteria with which to view the product's general worthiness, and to anchor discussions of the various benefits and drawbacks of implementing it (in some form, at some point, on some wiki) in direct evidence from a more diverse set of stakeholders.
Jonathan
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