On Wed, Nov 6, 2013 at 7:13 AM, Brion Vibber <bvibber(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:
My brief thoughts:
* It makes sense to have a handful of folks as a core review & planning
group.
Agreed.
* However, I would consider avoiding using the term
"Architect" for its
members as it's easily conflated with existing WMF job titles. I think job
titles are pretty unreliable indicators at the best of times, and of course
can be wildly inconsistent across companies.
This.
* I've got no particular patience for over-formal
community processes like
Wikipedia adminship voting, nor interest in replicating those processes.
A million times this.
While there are plenty of problems with the
traditional FOSS concept of
"meritocracy", I still have great affection for the "do-it-ocracy"
notion
that folks who actually get stuff done should be recognized as fulfilling
the roles they are performing.
People who do things are more valuable than people who only
voice armchair opinions :)
As such, I'd recommend a slightly more formal role
for additional "lead
reviewers" or "module owners" in the code review & RFC processes; not
as
*gatekeepers* so much as to provide a next-step for getting something
moving that's stalled -- a potential contributor or a team within WMF
working on a feature should be able to easily determine who to talk to
about getting a go/no-go or advice on what to do in case of a no-go.
(For comparison, I occasionally write patches for Firefox and Firefox OS;
they have a *really full* bug tracker and your only hope of getting a patch
reviewed is to actually request review from a particular person. A list of
module owners like <https://wiki.mozilla.org/Modules/FirefoxOS> is a
lifesaver for a casual contributor who doesn't know everybody on the
Mozilla teams.)
So yeah, I think that's the idea behind the "Maintainers" page
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Developers/Maintainers>. It could be more
complete. And finding a way to involve these stakeholders in the RFC process
could certainly be beneficial.
-Chad