In April 2017 the Wikimedia Foundation's TechOps Labs and Community Tech Tool Labs support teams merged into the Wikimedia Cloud Services team [0][1]. This new team is in charge of Wikimedia Labs, Tool Labs, the Labs database replicas (in partnership with the DBA team), data dump servers (in partnership with Ariel), Quarry, and PAWS.

One component of the internal Foundation pitch for creating the team was that this would provide an opportunity to break with the past and undertake a rebranding effort designed to address the 'Labs labs labs problem' [2], as well as to raise awareness in the Wikimedia communities of the products and services offered under the Cloud Services umbrella.

I'm happy to present the initial outline of the rebranding effort: https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:BryanDavis/Rebranding_Cloud_Services_products.

I would like to invite anyone interested in the future of Labs and Tool Labs to read the outline of rebranding tasks and provide feedback on gaps in the plan or aspects of the rebranding proposal that will conflict with other projects. This is a consultation and not consensus based decision making process. Not all things are possible in this space due to various restrictions including trademarks and copyrights.

This consultation will stay open until at least 2017-05-26 to collect initial feedback. The entire Cloud Services team will also be present at the Vienna hackathon to discuss the topic in person with people who are there and interested.

[0]: https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimedia-l/2017-February/086343.html [1]: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Cloud_Services_team [2]: https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Labs_labs_labs

Bryan