2010/10/15 Aryeh Gregor Simetrical+wikilist@gmail.com:
The number one thing that volunteers are unhappy about is non-deployment of volunteer code. Why? Because the only reason for their participation is so that their code should be deployed. When their code is neglected while other people's code is deployed immediately, solely because those other people happen to work for Wikimedia, that will result in a great deal of frustration no matter what attitude anyone approaches it with. And the solution is simple: Wikimedia has to allocate the resources to deploy volunteer code continually, just like employee code. Which it has, and that decision will have a much greater impact on the staff-volunteer relationship than any change in attitude possibly could.
+1
I whole-heartedly agree with the analysis that deploy backlog is at the hear of this. I have some gut feelings I can't word very well right now that say the "solely because they're not WMF" isn't completely fair, but what you've stated multiple times in various guises is true: what matters is perception, fair or not. If volunteers *feel* ignored, that's bad. We can all go "oh but we're not really ignoring /just/ you, we're ignoring others too!", that's not very convincing.
We need to come up with a plan that takes us back to regular (weekly?) deployments. I think cleaning up the CR backlog is an uncontroversial first step. What I have in mind personally is to have this move to regular deployments coincide with the 1.17 release, but that should be discussed in a separate thread I guess.
Roan Kattouw (Catrope)