On 9/8/2010 1:45 PM, Ryan Kaldari wrote:
On 9/7/10 11:23 PM, Robert Leverington wrote:
This may well be true for the community in general, but this discussion is specifically about the volunteer developer community, which is clearly being left out of the loop in a large respect - otherwise this discussion would not exist.
I agree that the volunteer dev community is not as in-the-loop as paid staff, but it's not because the Foundation is trying to keep them out of the loop. Communicating with the dev community, the broader community, fellow staff, and keeping up with an aggressive development schedule is not an easy task!
In 90% of of cases, there should be little difference between communicating with staff and communicating with the developer community. Obviously there will be some non-development related staff communication, but there really shouldn't be a difference between communicating with staff and the community. An intentional or incidental separation between staff and community is really the underlying problem.
It doesn't take a conspiracy to not satisfactorily fulfill all of those requirements. Obviously, we can stand some improvement, which is why the Foundation is planning on specifically hiring someone to act as a bugmeister and development coordinator in the very near future. What we need are helpful (and realistic) suggestions for how to improve communication, not misguided badgering about "secret channels".
Getting rid of excessive amounts of communication channels isn't a useful suggestion? There are 2 main public mailing lists and 3 main public IRC channels. Then there's about a dozen other "minor" public mailing lists. How many additional ones are needed? Why does the non-staff community need to be excluded from them?
A few years ago, there were few staff developers and many worked remotely. There were few of the communication issues we have now. More recently, the WMF hired more staff developers and began concentrating them in the main office and some private channels/lists sprung up to support them. Now we have communication problems. Its possible its just a coincidence, but it certainly doesn't look like one. At the very least, decreasing excessive "bureaucracy" (for lack of a better term) is something that should be considered as a matter of course.