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 Starling<tstarling(a)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 Kaldari<rkaldari(a)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