MZ, I think we should be grateful that WMF is dedicating resources to power users, make suggestions to them on what we most want them to work on, and leave it at that.
I'm willing to be critical of WMF when I feel that the situation calls for it. That's not the case here.
Pine
On Tue, May 19, 2015 at 5:11 PM, MZMcBride z@mzmcbride.com wrote:
Jonathan Morgan wrote:
On Tue, May 19, 2015 at 6:52 AM, MZMcBride z@mzmcbride.com wrote:
What is "Community Tech"? How does it differ from the work the rest of the engineering and product team is doing? Are there people working for the Wikimedia Foundation who are doing design and development that is not for the Wikimedia community? That would be pretty worrying.
Really? It's worrying that the Wikimedia Foundation would devote design and development resources towards projects that don't directly benefit 5+/month editors?* Like, for example, readers?
*"active Wikimedia editors" mentioned on the meta page
It's darkly amusing that you would translate "Wikimedia community" to mean users with some arbitrary number of edits per month.
Yes, you are misunderstanding. I'm sorry the team fails to impress you. The community tech team is a product of the recent Engineering reorganization, and I assume our colleagues will make an announcement once the team is fully assembled. In the meantime, they're eliciting ideas. What exactly is so insulting about a new team, still in the process of being formed, eliciting ideas for projects to work on?
Maybe you can explain how this new effort is different from the thousands of Phabricator Maniphest tasks at https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/maniphest/ and pages such as https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/CEP/Process_ideas and https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wish_list? Is there really some shortage of ideas of what to work on? Can you perhaps see how it might seem a little rude to show up with a "Community Tech" team and start asking "hey, yeah, so, uh, got any ideas for what we should be doing"? Are the other technical teams really engaged in projects not focused on serving the Wikimedia community? Are we creating teams that have no clear objectives? Didn't we just do this exercise in 2014 and we actively do some version of it on a daily basis in Phabricator?
I don't believe you're truly sorry that the team fails to impress me. I think you actually agree with me about the virtue of having these small teams with vague, yet potentially massive, scopes such as Community Tech and Multimedia. I think experience tells us it's very difficult for them to be effective and beneficial, but... this isn't a very technical topic, so I suppose we should move this discussion elsewhere. :-)
MZMcBride
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