Hi MZMcBride!

Thank you for your reply. I had to think a bit to come up with a structured way to respond. Before I reply, I want to be sure I understand your concerns, so I will list them here, paraphrased. Please speak up if I didn’t capture any of them accurately:

0) (Implied) There seems to be discomfort with the level of WMF control over MediaWiki and/or concern about the relationship between the WMF and the wider Wikimedia movement

1) Automatic membership of the CTO seems to contradict the statement that membership is not tied to WMF (or other) employment

2) The CTO should not automatically be a member

3) The CTO should not have veto power over anything

4) This document was written almost entirely by WMF (and WMDE) employees, with little if any input from the broader technical community

5) The details of this charter, such as escalation to the CTO, do not seem consistent with the ideals of the committee leading on behalf of the wider community

Here is my response to the above points:

re #0: This seems to be the issue underlying most of the other concerns, so I'd like to address it first and in depth.

For better or worse, the reality is: The WMF, via its engineers and the CTO, controls MW development. You will currently not get changes done to MediaWiki against the will of payed MWF engineers.

I appreciate that this charter may be seen as a way to reinforce this situation, instead of trying to change it. The issue of balancing the power of WMF (plus, to an extent, WMDE) with the wishes of volunteer contributors and 3rd party professionals has been a longstanding one. This charter is not going to solve the issue. But I don’t believe it makes the situation worse - it rather makes it more clear. Hidden power structures are generally worse than explicit ones.

We chose a pragmatic approach: To formalize what is currently reality, and aim to act not only as a committee of experts, but also as an interface for volunteer contributors. I suppose we can get better at the latter. We are open to suggestions.

One reason for the imbalance is that there are many casual contributors, but there is no big community of consistent highly skilled volunteer contributors. Even 3rd party professional contributions are few and far between. The WMF is investing in the community of volunteer developers through events like hackathons and resources like Wikimedia Cloud Services. Our goal is to strengthen that community and bring it to the table as much as possible.

There is a handful of highly skilled consistent long term contributors around. I know these people read and participate on wikitech-l. None of them chose to comment on the charter so far, see #4.

Overall, I don't think this concern can be addressed by the wording of the charter. It's a structural problem of the community, and it's not easy to fix.

By the way, if you know a volunteer contributor who should be a member of TechCom, please let us know. We are looking to balance our pretty biased collective skill set anyway.

re #1: We don’t see a contradiction. Perhaps it could be stated explicitly that the CTO is an exception to the rule that membership is not tied to employment, but it doesn’t seem necessary. The CTO will be a member, and otherwise the committee has control over membership, subject to CTO veto power (which we don’t expect to be used often, if ever).

re #2: could be debated, but the CTO being a member, and the CTO having veto power, is a direct result of the approach we have taken to the authorization of the committee, and its interaction with the WMF org chart: The committee acts as an extension of the CTO. This finally gives the committee a clear place in the "chain of command", and real authority over software development at the WMF, where it formerly had none.

re #3: the CTO, by definition, already has the ultimate power over all technical development at the WMF. The WMF controls MediaWiki development. The powers of the CTO as stated in the charter simply make this reality explicit.

Perhaps your desire is to have TechCom balance the power of the CTO. This would mean that TechCom would need to have a different formal relationship with WMF management, perhaps by acting as an extension of the board. This would require a lot of deliberation. Also, it would give the committee only indirect power, and very little direct influence on development. The proposed charter is much closer to the status quo of ArchCom.

re #4: the Charter was written by the Committee, which currently consists of WMF and WMDE employees. Input was solicited on multiple occasions via the ArchCom Radar mail on wikitech-l, and via Tech News #23 (2017-06-05). No non-employees chose to comment.

re #5: the committee (including the CTO) "represents" the technical community (which includes payed staff) in technical decision processes - it's where management (and engineers) should come when they want to know what "the techies think". Much better than a mailing list, where the response may often be... crickets.

The possibility of escalation to an ultimate authority ensures clear and timely decision making -- many open source projects have a benevolent dictator for this purpose. For MediaWiki, this responsibility will be shared among the members of TechCom. This seems more democratic and more scalable to me.

I hope I could make my position clear: I too see the problem you see, but I think this charter is a step in the right direction. I certainly don't think it will make matters worse by increasing power concentration. Instead, it for the first time defines a group that can act as an interface between WMF engineering and volunteer contributors when making high impact technical decisions.

Regards, Daniel

PS: Please note that this is my personal view. The view of other committee members may differ.

Am 20.07.2017 um 18:52 schrieb MZMcBride:

Daniel Kinzler wrote:

...

Over the last couple of months, the Architecture Committee has been working on a charter that defines the Committee's purpose of authority. Thank you for your input! The final draft of the charter is now available at:

https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Architecture_committee/Charter

For a final round of feedback, we are following the procedure we also use when approving RFCs. As per yesterday's ArchCom meeting, the charter is entering the Last Call period. If no new and pertinent concerns are raised and remain unaddressed by July 26, the charter will be enacted as the new basis of the committee's operation and authority.

How do you reconcile these two sentences?

"The WMF CTO is automatically a member."

"TechCom has full discretion over adding or removing members, with the CTO having veto power. Committee membership is not tied to employment by the WMF or any other organization."

I don't think the Wikimedia Foundation Inc.'s current CTO should automatically be a member of a technical committee for Wikimedia projects. And I certainly don't think the current CTO should have veto power over anything. I'm also pretty wary of this document as it seems to have been almost entirely written by Wikimedia Foundation Inc. employees. Where is the input and representation of the rest of the Wikimedia technical community outside of current Wikimedia Foundation Inc. (or Wikimedia Deutschland) employees?

And then there are parts like this:

"Conflicts can be escalated to the [current Wikimedia Foundation Inc.] CTO."

Bleh. This page is speaking out of both sides of its mouth. It's claiming to be representative of the Wikimedia technical community, while also basically (re-?)establishing itself as a mere extension of the current bureaucracy of Wikimedia Foundation Inc. The lofty sentences such as "Within Wikimedia, technology leadership is not vested in a single individual, but in the technical community. That leadership is focused in TechCom." are counter-acted by the finer print (i.e., the actual proposed implementation of this committee).

MZMcBride

---

Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l

Hi Nemo!

Thanks for your comments. Please note that the last call period is over, and the charter has been officially adopted on Wednesdays. I mentioned this in the Radar email yesterday. I'll send out a separate announcement today.

You wrote:

Daniel wrote:

...

This finally gives the committee a clear place in the "chain of command", and real authority over software development at the WMF, where it formerly had none.

This is a compelling argument, but why not call it Wikimedia Foundation Technical Committee then? It would also be easier to clarify that it's mostly/only meant for WMF staff and whoever else decides to submit to its process (this is already implied b​​y phrases such as "developers or teams"), rather than for MediaWiki in general.

The charter does not reduce the committees scope from what it was before, it expands it. Also, it does not reduce authority, but expands it.

Volunteers are by definition only subject to processes they decide to submit to. The new charter changes nothing for volunteers. However, with the new charter, WMF staff is now subject to TechCom decisions, based on the CTO's authority. This was not the case before.

P.s.: Not commenting is not necessarily a choice. For instance, the talk page doesn't use wikitext and therefore creates selection bias for the discussion.

Well, using wikitext is also a barrier to many, so that would also create a selection bias. Even using computers creates a selection bias. Seriously - we are talking about developers. I expect they are able to use a thread based discussion board as well as they can use wiki syntax. And if they totally hate flow, they can just reply to the email.

Regards, Daniel

Am 29.07.2017 um 04:44 schrieb Brian Wolff:

Volunteers are subject to all sorts of processes they dont (directly) consent to. Sure they could walk away if they dont like a process, just like staff can quit if they dont like something, but thats rarely a real option.

Sure, to have certain things done, volunteers have to submit to certain processes. My point was that volunteers are free to pick what they want to see done, and thus what processes they submit to. Staff doesn't have that choice - unless, as you said, they quit. Sure, that's always an options, but not really comparable.

What I was getting at is: for volunteer developers, the new charter effectively changes nothing. Except perhaps that they gain some more influence on wmf development via TechCom, which now has at least some authority within the wmf org chart.

-- Daniel Kinzler Senior Software Developer

Wikimedia Deutschland Gesellschaft zur Förderung Freien Wissens e.V.

Am 29.07.2017 um 17:43 schrieb Pine W:

...

Staff doesn't have that choice - unless, as you said, they quit. Sure, that's always an options, but not

really

...

comparable.

I don't think that being paid well in exchange for being unhappy, especially if someone is highly stressed or miserable most days, is a good deal. If someone feels that way then I would encourage them to either try to negotiate changes to their work environment internally, or to find a new employer.

That makes it sounds like people are being forced to put up with horrible things. That's not what I meant. I was referring to the fact that when you work in an organization, it's part of your job to stick to pre-defined processes, and it's part of your job to follow some agreed-upon roadmap. Volunteers have the luxury on working on what they want, when they want. One reason to pay people is so the less appealing stuff also gets done, and gets done in time. That's a fair deal, I think.

My point was - for certain topics, TechCom is now part of the official decision making process at the wmf. That's new. For volunteers, nothing changes, really.

As to workplace satisfaction at the WMF - that's an entirely different topic. I sure hope that the involvement of TechCom in certain questions doesn't make people's job horribly frustrating now. I rather hope it would reduce frustration, at least in the long run.