Hi,
On the second day of the Wikimedia Developer Summit (January 10) there will be a Q&A session with Victoria Coleman (Wikimedia Foundation CTO) and Wes Moran (VP of Product). It is a plenary session and it will be video-streamed.
The questions for this session are being crowdsourced at http://www.allourideas.org/wikidev17-product-technology-questions. Anyone can propose questions and vote, anonymously, as many times as you want. At the moment, we have 25 questions and 451 votes.
An important technical detail: questions posted later have also good chances to make it to the top of the list as long as new voters select them. The ranking is made out of comparisons between questions, not accumulation of votes. For instance, the current top question is in fact one of the last that has been submitted so far.
Why posting or voting a good question? One obvious reason is to encourage the Foundation's Technology and Product top managers to bring a good answer in a public session with minutes taken and video recording. :) Beyond that, if the ranking of questions makes sense and is backed by participation numbers, it has a serious chance to influence plans and discussions beyond the Summit.
The current ranking does make sense, but maybe you could help covering more areas, other perspectives?
1. How do we deal with the lack of maintainers for all Wikimedia deployed code? 2. Do we have a plan to bring our developer documentation to the level of a top Internet website, a major free software project? 3. For WMF dev teams, what is the right balance between pushing own work versus seeking and supporting volunteer contributors? 4. During the next year or so, what balance do you think we should strike between new projects and technical debt? 5. When are we going to work on a modern talk pages system for good? 6. Whose responsibility is to assure that all MediaWiki core components and the extensions deployed in Wikimedia have active maintainers? 7. How important is to have a well maintained and well promoted catalog of tools, apps, gadgets, bots, templates, extensions...? 8. Will MediaWiki ever become easier to install and manage? (e.g. plugin manager à la Wordpress). How much do we care about enterprise users? 9. What should be the role of the Architecture Committee in WMF planning (priorities, goals, resources...) and are we there yet? 10. In addition to Community Tech, should the other WMF Product teams prioritize their work taking into account the Community Wishlist results?
The full list: http://www.allourideas.org/wikidev17-product-technology-questions/results