Neil Kandalgaonkar wrote:
On 5/31/11 3:20 PM, MZMcBride wrote:
taking a page out of the rest of the business world's book, you set a deadline and then it just fucking gets met. No excuses, no questions.
I think you have an optimistic view of how businesses actually work. :)
It's funny that you say that. When there was a hard deadline for the UploadWizard being deployed (November 30?), what happened? Was the deadline met?
It's not a matter of Wikimedia having the ability to set and meet deadlines; they've pretty clearly demonstrated that when something is important enough, it's not an issue. In this case, it's a matter of finding/creating the _willingness_ to set/meet the deadlines (and the lack of resulting consequences if/when deadlines are missed).
I occasionally show my face at wiki-meetups, and invariably tech comes up for discussion (MediaWiki/tech being at the center of nearly everything Wikimedia). My view (and perhaps others share it) is that Wikimedia code development can be summed up like this currently: there are so many cooks in the kitchen and yet dinner is always late.
Perhaps the answer is that we have to give the volunteer developers some obvious pathway to harmonizing their and our priorities. Like, if you're working on files and multimedia, you should be emailing Bryan, me, or maybe Tim or Russell. Could it be that simple?
I don't think being more explicit/clear about what people are working on could ever be a bad thing. Will it help alleviate whichever problem it is you're thinking about? I don't know. But I can't imagine a wiki page making it clear who works on what is going to hurt anything. It can only really help. :-)
MZMcBride