Erik Moeller wrote:
On Thu, Jun 2, 2011 at 2:26 AM, Roan Kattouw roan.kattouw@gmail.com wrote:
I like the 20% model as well. It goes a little bit further than my suggestion, which was 20, 25 or 33% model for certain senior devs, but if you're volunteering to give me more than what I asked for that's even better :) . For numerous reasons, I think getting /everyone/ involved with service work is a great idea.
To keep the ball rolling, I've started a draft here, based in part on your comments: http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Development_process_improvement/20%25_policy
Please be bold and/or add your thoughts. As per the note on the page and other comments in this thread, a policy like this isn't a replacement for dedicated staff supporting the code review and release process; it's merely one component of ensuring appropriate capacity is available for relevant work.
This looks great! Both your post and Brion's yesterday have been spot-on.
I think with a few people doing shell bugs every week (as an example), the backlog will be killed in no time. "Shell" bugs are generally some of the most user-facing issues, so reducing time between filing and fulfillment on those will go a long way toward keeping users happy. There are also structural improvements that can be made (such as getting a "Configure" extension working on Wikimedia wikis) that could eliminate the need for sysadmin intervention a lot of the time. I'm not sure if working on projects that like would fall within the 20% rule as written, but it's something to think about.
The only other point from your list that I think maybe could possibly be made explicit is a focus on the sister projects. It's pretty clear that during the 80%, Wikipedia is the central focus. I've been doing some work on Wikisource lately and without looking very hard, it's very easy to see how some support structures on the sister sites (API support, rewrites of some of these extensions, moving code from JavaScript to PHP, etc.) could really enable third-party developers.
Overall, this seems like a really positive step in the right direction. :-)
MZMcBride