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.

I looked at <https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Staff_and_contractors#Community_Tech and I can't say that I'm very impressed with what I see. Three cordoned off positions, one vacant, to serve the tens of thousands of volunteers that create and build the wiki projects and drive the Wikimedia movement forward? Clearly I'm just misunderstanding, as it would be pretty unimaginable for anyone to seemingly be this insulting.

Jonathan Morgan wrote: It's darkly amusing that you would translate "Wikimedia community" to mean users with some arbitrary number of edits per month. 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 _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l

On 5/19/15, Pine W &lt;wiki.pine(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: power Isn't part of the criticism of this thread that the team has unclear scope? Is the WMF actually dedicating resources to power users? From where I'm sitting, it looks like the every special interest group is happy that community tech is being dedicated to them. Some people seem to think its going to be creating bots for communities that can't do it themselves, maintaining existing bots, provide technical support for grant requests, fix bug requests primarily affecting elite users fix bug requests primarily affecting unloved sister projects or even (earlier in this thread) fix uploading of large files. Community-tech is not going to fix everything for everyone. Eventually people will realize this, and its much better to be clear on the scope up front rather then have a bunch of very disappointed users later. I appreciate that the team is just getting off the ground, but presumably there is some notion of what its actually going to do, otherwise hiring for the team would be really hard. Or if it is really trying to do everything, I predict that not working out well. --bawolff _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l

This is heads up that Kaldari has kindly started a page

projects ideas: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Community_Tech_project_ideas. Feel free to check and add your wishlist :)

On Tue, May 19, 2015 at 6:52 AM, MZMcBride &lt;z(a)mzmcbride.com&gt; wrote: the Yes, everything WMF does has a community aspect (except facilities?), so it's tricky to know when to highlight it. And "community" is an open-ended pluralistic term, like "User" or "Open". It's reasonable to want teams to be more specific, give them a little more time as we work through the reorg. I'm forming an Open Community Core Engagement team, dedicated to experimenting on wiki users. <-- joke, I kid Peace, -- =S Page WMF Tech writer _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l

Hmm, I'm not sure that I'd agree that everything that WMF does has a community aspect. There's been a lot of discussion about readership that to me seems primarily concerned with fundraising and only secondly concerned with recruiting new contributors and otherwise serving the community. (I'm not opposed to fundraising, I just want to clarify that community support is a step removed from the interest in readership.) There's also the open question of what to do with the millions of dollars in WMF reserves, and whether current grantmaking and affiliation policies and processes are actually hindering progress in certain areas, as we discussed a bit at the Wikimedia Conference and elsewhere; thankfully it sounds like Grantmaking is going to go through a community consultation this year, and I hope to see some rethinking of current policies and practices. Pine