I think we are misusing the term "priority" here. Priority for whom? Setting something to "lowest" priority implies that users do not care about the item. Unbreak now implies users need it fixed right away. "we have no resources" does not mean its not needed, it just means WMF does not view it as a priority, which might align, but frequently misalign with the user's needs.
I suggest we use dashboard columns for the planning activities, while keeping the tasks themselves fully under "requester's" control. E.g. let the community decide what is more important, but use dashboards for team work planning. This way, if a volunteer developer wants to contribute, they would look for the highest-demanded bugs that don't have active status in any teams.
On Tue, Oct 2, 2018 at 7:32 PM Stas Malyshev smalyshev@wikimedia.org wrote:
Hi!
On 10/2/18 9:57 AM, Brion Vibber wrote:
*nods* I think the root problem is that the phabricator task system does double duty as both an *issue reporting system* for users and a *task tracker* for devs.
This is probably the real root cause. But I don't think we are going to make the split anytime soon, even if we wanted to (which is not certain), and this mode of operation is very common in many organizations.
Realizing this, I think we need some mode of explicitly saying "we do not have any means to do it now or in near-term future, but we don't reject it completely and if we ever have resources or ways to do this, we might revisit this".
We kinda sorta have this with "Stalled" status and "Need volunteer" tag, but we might want to get this status more prominent and distinguish "TODO" items outside of any planning cycle and the ones that are part of the ongoing development. And document it in the lifecycle document.
-- Stas Malyshev smalyshev@wikimedia.org
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