Le 06/11/13 02:57, Erik Moeller a écrit :
tl;dr: I’d appreciate thoughts from the Wikimedia technical community at large whether the designation of individual technical contributors as "architects" should be meaningful, and if so, how to expand it beyond the original triumvirate (Brion, Tim & Mark), e.g. by transitioning to a community-driven process for recognizing architects.
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Hello,
I would have a look at the way IETF is handling its RFC process. I wrote about it back in July in the thread "proposed RFC process":
http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2013-July/070241.html
The workflow is as bureaucratic as you can imagine given the number of parties involved and all the political / commercial context that goes behind creating internet standards. You can still achieve a RFC pretty "quickly".
To scale out the architects roles, I would formalize the concept of self organized working groups. Their responsibility would be to produce a draft to be presented to a technical board. Once the standard is approved / implemented / released, the working group is disbanded.
How would it work?
Any individual having an idea would expose it on wikitech-l to gain people to its cause. They would form a self organized working group using whatever tools and practices they agree upon. The aim of the group would be to produce a draft.
The technical board would be made of the smartest people we have, ideally including non wikimedia people. To name a few, at the *very minimum* I would include Brion, Tim, Mark and Ori and definitely Daniel Kinzler from WMDE, probably adding Rob as the facilitator.
The board responsibilities would be: - provide support to the working group leaders - ensure working groups are progressing - handle conflicts between members of a group - ensure the working groups work are not overlapping - accept the produced drafts as RFC.
Whenever a working group publishes a draft, it would be reviewed by whoever is interested and amended until it has consensus. The draft is then proposed to the technical board which has the final word and publish the draft as a RFC.
As to who is going to implement the RFC, I guess it depends on who needs it in the first place. Most of the time it would be for Wikimedia, so the Wikimedia engineering managers would be responsible to get the standard implemented, released and deployed. The draft could well propose a working implementation as well.
If a working group is working on an ambitious feature, it could probably use some real life meeting from time to time.
The technical board could use some monthly meetings much like the RFC review IRC meeting we are already having.
Finally, the MediaWiki architecture summit would gather all the working groups members and technical board members with an agenda of drafts to approve or vision of the next working groups to form.
Example:
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Requests_for_comment/LESS
Working group was Ori Livneh, Jon Robson, Steven Walling. They came with a draft and implementation after a few review cycles.
Along the process Brion stepped in to offer technical reviews/guidance.
Brion eventually accepted it by marking the RfC complete and merging the implementation.
End result: MediaWiki now supports LESS.
My ERROR: rounding error in '%s cents' % 0,02