Erik Moeller wrote:
On Thu, Jun 2, 2011 at 2:26 AM, Roan Kattouw
<roan.kattouw(a)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