On Fri, Oct 16, 2009 at 9:58 AM, Platonides Platonides@gmail.com wrote:
ChrisiPK wrote:
Gerard Meijssen wrote:
FYI I have an interest in improving several things for Commons. Some things are waiting for adoption for over a year and I am not done waiting.
So do I and I think we need to make some sort of summary what we actually want to do. I have tried this by creating a proposal on the strategy wiki[1], but there has not been an awful lot of input over there. If you know a better place where such discussion should take place, please let me know. Also some sort of watchlist would be nice where suggested improvemets are listed, among with improvements awaiting implementation and so on.
Thanks and regards,
ChrisiPK
There is http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Bugs listing a good number of things that we want. If Howie is going to work "improving commons" I hope him to cut down that list, instead of working on a new feature that he thought might be neat. I'm not trying to discourage new ideas, they wouldprobably be good. But I see that the Foundation POV of the issues needing tech attention is often different than the one seen from the community, since the work for many hires surprise me. For example, I don't think that working on LiquidThreads would have been pointed as a priority by many members (the current system is "not too broken"). Strategy intends to learn which things are important, but just having a developer coming to the Village Pump to implement whatever the local community needs [and is reasonable] could make a difference. It wouldn't be appropiate for Big Changes, but would give an easy say for many small changes that may simply annoy them. Making volunteers happy is important, too.
Rather than having developers visit village pumps on various projects, it would be good for a standard and well-advertised technical forum to be set up somewhere (mediawiki.org, meta) to discuss feature requests from the community and help communicate community desires and priorities to the developer community. Bugzilla sort of serves that purpose now, but I know that many people are intimidated by that format and it isn't well suited for general consensus gauging discussions.
-Robert Rohde