On 9/8/2010 10:18 AM, Aryeh Gregor wrote:

Well, this is probably my last post on this subject for now.  I think

I've made my points.  Those who don't get them yet probably will

continue not to get them, and those who get them but disagree probably

will continue to disagree.  It looks like nothing big is going to

change right now, but I hope that when Danese gets up to this, we'll

see real improvements and not just attempts to paper over the problem

without properly understanding it.

I'll just make a few further brief points to reiterate some things I

said that seem to still be misunderstood:

On Sun, Sep 5, 2010 at 10:27 PM, Tim Starlingtstarling@wikimedia.org  wrote:

I don't think you really know that. It's hard to see how much work

goes on behind closed doors when you only have a cursory involvement

with the project.

It's pretty easy to figure out that there aren't daily (or weekly or

monthly) face-to-face meetings among developers who live scattered

across the world.

None of the open source projects I've been involved with fit the model

you describe. For instance, Squid makes heavy use of face-to-face

meetings, despite their geographically distributed development team.

Just to be clear: face-to-face meetings are great, in moderation.  I'm

totally in favor of them.  But having lots of conferences is not the

same as working in an office together.

I think that's a false dichotomy.

It is.  There's a spectrum of middle ground in between, but the

endpoints are perfectly tenable as well.  I think that, given

Wikimedia's mission as well as practical concerns, moving MediaWiki

development significantly further toward openness would be a good

thing.

I can say that despite being a nobody at Mozilla and having gotten

only one (rather trivial) patch accepted, I feel like I'm taken more

seriously by most of their paid developers than by most of ours.

I'm sorry to hear that, and I'd like to know (off list) which paid

developers are making you feel that way.

It would be unfair to name anyone, in public or in private.  If I've

had negative experiences with some paid developers, that should really

count in their favor, because it means I have had *some* experience

interacting with them, period.  If we exclude paid developers who were

preexisting community members:

* I can think of two who I see with any regularity in #mediawiki.

* I can think of maybe three who I've had more than one conversation

with on IRC ever.

* I don't think I've ever seen a wikitech-l post from the majority of them.

I can't think why most of them should even know who I am, except now

maybe some disgruntled volunteer who's making trouble for them.  Why

would I *expect* them to respect me?

On Tue, Sep 7, 2010 at 8:29 PM, Ryan Kaldarirkaldari@wikimedia.org  wrote:

First of all, all this talk of secret listservs and IRC channels is

malarkey. Yes, there are private listservs and IRC channels. All of them

are private for very specific and well-established reasons. Most of them

are only used in very specific circumstances (for example if there was a

security breach that needed to be discussed privately) and tend to be

very low traffic. They are not the places where important decisions are

made.

1) Either paid developers are coordinating someplace where volunteers

don't see it, or they're not coordinating at all.  The latter is

implausible, so it's the former.  It makes no difference if it's

face-to-face meetings, teleconferences, IRC, or mailing lists, or even

a technically public place that volunteers don't know about -- it's

hidden.

2) The secret IRC channel is not low-traffic.  The 1000th line before

now in #wikimedia-tech (excluding parts/joins/etc., also excluding /me

for simplicity) was about five days ago:

$ grep -v '[^ ]* [^ ]* *' FreeNode-#wikimedia-tech.log | tail -n 1000

| head -n 1

100903 16:08:55<jps>  and if you are only doing those in groups of 10,

you need to multiply by at least 3

Doing the same on my log of the secret channel gives 100903 00:03:40,

meaning it has roughly the same traffic level as #wikimedia-tech over

that period.  Anyone who hangs out there can tell you that almost

nothing there is secret.  I can't speak for private-l, because I'm not

on it.

Secondly, the idea that developers here in the office don't interact

with the community is absurd. The developers here interact with the

community constantly.

If the goal is to attract volunteers and make them feel part of the

community, it doesn't matter whether the paid people think they're

doing a good enough job.  It matters whether the volunteers think it.

I'm pretty sure it's clear by now that practically none of us do.  As

I said, anyone interested in fixing the problem would do well to start

by surveying volunteers rather than looking at the issue from their

own perspective, and Danese told me she does plan to do that -- so

I'll wait.

Hi all,

Ok here is my idea for today:

The Linux community thrives because every volunteer developer has access to the full kernel and operating system, and can innovate totally on their own, and the best work will make it into the kernel which is redeployed to all users for future innovation.  This is basically the wild west of open source software.  I think Wikimedia foundation has done amazing work over the years, as I am learning about XML etc I can see all the work that was put into it all, but now that it is so complex

I think it is hard for the internal Wikimedia developers to interact with the community as there are so many volunteer feature requests and patches that aren't able to be handled by Wikimedia foundation, as was described in this discussion.

I think there should be a volunteer managed cloud computing project that is made specifically for development of mediaWiki and also for development of database dumps and image dumps or any other good ideas volunteers have.  It will not be competing with Wikimedia foundation, but instead would be a partnership that is designed to be beneficial to everyone to allow development to take place easier.  This cloud computing project could be sponsored by the Wikimedia foundation or by volunteers.

Some things that could be tested on the cloud computing project could be XML schema change to include diff's to handle article revisions, so that

the full history dumps would grow at a much slower rate.  I am sure there are 1000000 ideas that volunteers would have.  How much would it cost to set up a cloud computing project like this?

Thanks for reading,

cheers

Jamie