Hi, I'm renaming this spin-off because it has little to do with our real and urgent quest to find mentors for Outreachy. :)

...

On 9/28/15, Pine W wiki.pine@gmail.com wrote:

...

Hi Quim,

For projects that don't move forward in Outreachy for any reason, is

there

...

a way of suggesting that the particularly useful open projects get WMF

dev

...

time next quarter? It would be nice if there is a way to incorporate community priorities into quarterly department goal setting.

#Possible-Tech-Projects are in fact bad candidates for WMF goals, almost by design:

* The WMF's efficiency increases when we focus our resources in urgent/important tasks that volunteers cannot or prefer not to handle themselves.

* Interns and mentors participating in outreach programs must be allowed to learn, have fun, and eventually fail, and for that reason we avoid pushing urgent/important tasks as #Possible-Tech-Projects for volunteers.

There might be a situation where a #Possible-Tech-Project that didn't get any intern on Q1 is taken as a last team goal or as an individual goal at the WMF in a future quarter. But this would be an exception, not the norm.

On Mon, Sep 28, 2015 at 9:09 PM, Pine W wiki.pine@gmail.com wrote:

I was told by a WMF non-management employee that they have little discretion about which projects they're working on, and that the decisions about priorities come top-down.

Sometimes priorities come top-down, where "top" actually means different teams agreeing on common goals, or guidance coming from the annual plans, the strategy, the board, some kind of consultation, and whatever other inputs that make sense. Most of the goals in most of the quarters should be cooked by the own team members based on the priorities agreed by the team and with their natural neighbors. If a team feels systematically disempowered by top-down decisions about their own goals, then that is a problem that needs solving, but not a situation that should be considered as the norm.

Hence my interest in engaging with the quarterly planning processes and the people managing those processes to see if there's a way to get community input into the teams' quarterly goals.

As others have said, a good and direct way to propose tasks as quarterly goals is to go to those tasks and push for them. Find good arguments, align with other stakeholders, explain why this proposal fits with other ongoing plans and work... This is exactly what we do when proposing our own goals.