This is an idea I've had for a while, and I'd like to see if there's any interest, or on the contrary concerns, about it. I would like to explore (and if I have official blessing, champion) the idea of asking corporations with software engineering staff if they would be willing to let their employees volunteer their expertise and time to mediawiki while ideally still being on their employer's payroll. I mean engineering in the wide sense of the term, including Ops, QA, etc. and maybe even UX.
This would allow engineers to take a break for a predetermined duration from their usual work duties and contribute in a very productive manner to our open source projects. And maybe to other open source projects than mediawiki, but I think our project in particular is a great starting point. I see this as a flexible scheme. It doesn't really matter if people can do it for a day, a month, or a year, I believe that these inter-organization exchanges could have great value.
*Background*
Earlier this year the WMF's Multimedia team, which I'm a part of, had a volunteer working full-time with us, Aaron Arcos. Aaron used to work at Google and left to spend a year offering his software engineering skills to several non-profits. His work with us, bringing his experience from large projects at Google, was invaluable. He mentioned that when he told his former Google co-workers about his idea, some were interested and tempted to follow his example.
As some of you may now, Facebook is currently lending the WMF engineering resources in order to help with our HHVM deployment to production.
From my subjective perspective, as someone who's paid to be a software
engineer, I would definitely enjoy the ability to do something like that at certain points of my career. There's always a lot to learn by being thrown into the deep end of another organization's software development.
In fact, in the corporate world, Twitter and Etsy have identified these benefits and are doing this between themselves: http://thenextweb.com/insider/2012/09/11/twitter-etsy-run-engineer-exchange-...
In our own wiki world, we have Wikipedians in residence: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedian_in_residence
*The idea*
This is my take on it, and I'm really interested to hear some feedback and brainstorm on this. I think that starting talking to interested parties will be what gives shape and structure to the idea.
First and foremost I would see this outreach aimed at the engineers themselves. Because worst case scenario, if their employer isn't willing to donate continued payroll for that person while they're in residence, we should facilitate people like Aaron Arcos who are willing to donate their time and skills entirely for free. There may be engineers out there at the Googles and Facebooks of the world who don't know or might forget that they could help projects like mediawiki greatly if they took a break from their job and worked on open source for a while.
Secondly, I think that such a scheme would be easily pitched to companies (including other non-profits) as a training opportunity. As much as experienced engineers coming into the project have a lot to teach us, we also have a lot of interesting knowledge to teach in return, and the experience of working on this codebase alone, the scale of the traffic we're dealing with, etc., can have incredible training value.
I imagine this scheme as being entirely flexible. For a short period or a long period, still paid by their former employer or not, we should foster experienced engineers participating in our project for a period of time. We already participate in outreach to people with less experienced developers through GSoC and similar (maybe we're not doing enough of that for some people, but that's another topic!), and I think there is an unexplored opportunity in trying to do this with experienced folks.
Lastly, while everything I describe here is probably possible on an individual basis and does happen occasionally, I believe that having a catchy name (eg. "engineers in residence"), and an official scheme for it would greatly increase the frequency of it happening.
I could keep going on and on about this, but let's see what others think based on this rough idea. And if you're at Wikimania right now and are interested in discussing this topic, find me.
utter and complete rubbish as it excludes the community and leaves all development within corporate hands; All against free software philosophy and/or community involvement
programming should be a hobby, like editing articles
svetlana
On Sat, 9 Aug 2014, at 23:27, Gilles Dubuc wrote:
This is an idea I've had for a while, and I'd like to see if there's any interest, or on the contrary concerns, about it. I would like to explore (and if I have official blessing, champion) the idea of asking corporations with software engineering staff if they would be willing to let their employees volunteer their expertise and time to mediawiki while ideally still being on their employer's payroll. I mean engineering in the wide sense of the term, including Ops, QA, etc. and maybe even UX.
This would allow engineers to take a break for a predetermined duration from their usual work duties and contribute in a very productive manner to our open source projects. And maybe to other open source projects than mediawiki, but I think our project in particular is a great starting point. I see this as a flexible scheme. It doesn't really matter if people can do it for a day, a month, or a year, I believe that these inter-organization exchanges could have great value.
*Background*
Earlier this year the WMF's Multimedia team, which I'm a part of, had a volunteer working full-time with us, Aaron Arcos. Aaron used to work at Google and left to spend a year offering his software engineering skills to several non-profits. His work with us, bringing his experience from large projects at Google, was invaluable. He mentioned that when he told his former Google co-workers about his idea, some were interested and tempted to follow his example.
As some of you may now, Facebook is currently lending the WMF engineering resources in order to help with our HHVM deployment to production.
From my subjective perspective, as someone who's paid to be a software engineer, I would definitely enjoy the ability to do something like that at certain points of my career. There's always a lot to learn by being thrown into the deep end of another organization's software development.
In fact, in the corporate world, Twitter and Etsy have identified these benefits and are doing this between themselves: http://thenextweb.com/insider/2012/09/11/twitter-etsy-run-engineer-exchange-...
In our own wiki world, we have Wikipedians in residence: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedian_in_residence
*The idea*
This is my take on it, and I'm really interested to hear some feedback and brainstorm on this. I think that starting talking to interested parties will be what gives shape and structure to the idea.
First and foremost I would see this outreach aimed at the engineers themselves. Because worst case scenario, if their employer isn't willing to donate continued payroll for that person while they're in residence, we should facilitate people like Aaron Arcos who are willing to donate their time and skills entirely for free. There may be engineers out there at the Googles and Facebooks of the world who don't know or might forget that they could help projects like mediawiki greatly if they took a break from their job and worked on open source for a while.
Secondly, I think that such a scheme would be easily pitched to companies (including other non-profits) as a training opportunity. As much as experienced engineers coming into the project have a lot to teach us, we also have a lot of interesting knowledge to teach in return, and the experience of working on this codebase alone, the scale of the traffic we're dealing with, etc., can have incredible training value.
I imagine this scheme as being entirely flexible. For a short period or a long period, still paid by their former employer or not, we should foster experienced engineers participating in our project for a period of time. We already participate in outreach to people with less experienced developers through GSoC and similar (maybe we're not doing enough of that for some people, but that's another topic!), and I think there is an unexplored opportunity in trying to do this with experienced folks.
Lastly, while everything I describe here is probably possible on an individual basis and does happen occasionally, I believe that having a catchy name (eg. "engineers in residence"), and an official scheme for it would greatly increase the frequency of it happening.
I could keep going on and on about this, but let's see what others think based on this rough idea. And if you're at Wikimania right now and are interested in discussing this topic, find me. _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
On 9 August 2014 15:23, svetlana svetlana@fastmail.com.au wrote:
utter and complete rubbish as it excludes the community and leaves all development within corporate hands; All against free software philosophy and/or community involvement
Gilles' proposal does no such thing. On the contrary, what he proposes opens up development to an even wider audience, and strictly does not preclude volunteers from doing their own development just as before.
programming should be a hobby, like editing articles
Idealistically, sure. But then again, idealistically everything would be a hobby and we wouldn't need to work. Alas, we do not live in a world of ideals. :-)
Dan
It doesn't exclude the community, the community already contributes to the software. That's the point of open source. In fact I would expect that people who already contribute to mediawiki as hobby who are also software engineers as a day job would enjoy being given the freedom to work on what they're passionate about even more. The community as you describe it and people who work for corporations in order to pay their bills has a big overlap.
It would also be an opportunity to get valuable contributions from experienced people whose life constraints may not allow them to do this as a hobby. There's also a big difference in the nature of what you can contribute in your free time compared to a full-time basis.
On Sat, Aug 9, 2014 at 3:23 PM, svetlana svetlana@fastmail.com.au wrote:
utter and complete rubbish as it excludes the community and leaves all development within corporate hands; All against free software philosophy and/or community involvement
programming should be a hobby, like editing articles
svetlana
On Sat, 9 Aug 2014, at 23:27, Gilles Dubuc wrote:
This is an idea I've had for a while, and I'd like to see if there's any interest, or on the contrary concerns, about it. I would like to explore (and if I have official blessing, champion) the idea of asking
corporations
with software engineering staff if they would be willing to let their employees volunteer their expertise and time to mediawiki while ideally still being on their employer's payroll. I mean engineering in the wide sense of the term, including Ops, QA, etc. and maybe even UX.
This would allow engineers to take a break for a predetermined duration from their usual work duties and contribute in a very productive manner
to
our open source projects. And maybe to other open source projects than mediawiki, but I think our project in particular is a great starting
point.
I see this as a flexible scheme. It doesn't really matter if people can
do
it for a day, a month, or a year, I believe that these inter-organization exchanges could have great value.
*Background*
Earlier this year the WMF's Multimedia team, which I'm a part of, had a volunteer working full-time with us, Aaron Arcos. Aaron used to work at Google and left to spend a year offering his software engineering skills
to
several non-profits. His work with us, bringing his experience from large projects at Google, was invaluable. He mentioned that when he told his former Google co-workers about his idea, some were interested and tempted to follow his example.
As some of you may now, Facebook is currently lending the WMF engineering resources in order to help with our HHVM deployment to production.
From my subjective perspective, as someone who's paid to be a software engineer, I would definitely enjoy the ability to do something like that
at
certain points of my career. There's always a lot to learn by being
thrown
into the deep end of another organization's software development.
In fact, in the corporate world, Twitter and Etsy have identified these benefits and are doing this between themselves:
http://thenextweb.com/insider/2012/09/11/twitter-etsy-run-engineer-exchange-...
In our own wiki world, we have Wikipedians in residence: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedian_in_residence
*The idea*
This is my take on it, and I'm really interested to hear some feedback
and
brainstorm on this. I think that starting talking to interested parties will be what gives shape and structure to the idea.
First and foremost I would see this outreach aimed at the engineers themselves. Because worst case scenario, if their employer isn't willing
to
donate continued payroll for that person while they're in residence, we should facilitate people like Aaron Arcos who are willing to donate their time and skills entirely for free. There may be engineers out there at
the
Googles and Facebooks of the world who don't know or might forget that
they
could help projects like mediawiki greatly if they took a break from
their
job and worked on open source for a while.
Secondly, I think that such a scheme would be easily pitched to companies (including other non-profits) as a training opportunity. As much as experienced engineers coming into the project have a lot to teach us, we also have a lot of interesting knowledge to teach in return, and the experience of working on this codebase alone, the scale of the traffic we're dealing with, etc., can have incredible training value.
I imagine this scheme as being entirely flexible. For a short period or a long period, still paid by their former employer or not, we should foster experienced engineers participating in our project for a period of time.
We
already participate in outreach to people with less experienced
developers
through GSoC and similar (maybe we're not doing enough of that for some people, but that's another topic!), and I think there is an unexplored opportunity in trying to do this with experienced folks.
Lastly, while everything I describe here is probably possible on an individual basis and does happen occasionally, I believe that having a catchy name (eg. "engineers in residence"), and an official scheme for it would greatly increase the frequency of it happening.
I could keep going on and on about this, but let's see what others think based on this rough idea. And if you're at Wikimania right now and are interested in discussing this topic, find me. _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
this is an excellent idea and i don't think it needs to be focused only on large corporations or only on corporate individuals who want to volunteer. i would suggest opening the idea to any developer with a skill set that's needed or who wants to learn. and make it available in any Foundation office or chapter office in the world. depending on the skill set or learning situation might determine if the person was paid for their time or volunteered it.
personally i really liked your comparison, when we were chatting the other day, to an artist in residence -- imo, programmers are the artists of our time and this matches well.
offering housing and a stipend for food would be a good thing to include when the person volunteers their time.
o dan
On Aug 9, 2014, at 15:44 , Gilles Dubuc gilles@wikimedia.org wrote:
It doesn't exclude the community, the community already contributes to the software. That's the point of open source. In fact I would expect that people who already contribute to mediawiki as hobby who are also software engineers as a day job would enjoy being given the freedom to work on what they're passionate about even more. The community as you describe it and people who work for corporations in order to pay their bills has a big overlap.
It would also be an opportunity to get valuable contributions from experienced people whose life constraints may not allow them to do this as a hobby. There's also a big difference in the nature of what you can contribute in your free time compared to a full-time basis.
On Sat, Aug 9, 2014 at 3:23 PM, svetlana svetlana@fastmail.com.au wrote:
utter and complete rubbish as it excludes the community and leaves all development within corporate hands; All against free software philosophy and/or community involvement
programming should be a hobby, like editing articles
svetlana
On Sat, 9 Aug 2014, at 23:27, Gilles Dubuc wrote:
This is an idea I've had for a while, and I'd like to see if there's any interest, or on the contrary concerns, about it. I would like to explore (and if I have official blessing, champion) the idea of asking
corporations
with software engineering staff if they would be willing to let their employees volunteer their expertise and time to mediawiki while ideally still being on their employer's payroll. I mean engineering in the wide sense of the term, including Ops, QA, etc. and maybe even UX.
This would allow engineers to take a break for a predetermined duration from their usual work duties and contribute in a very productive manner
to
our open source projects. And maybe to other open source projects than mediawiki, but I think our project in particular is a great starting
point.
I see this as a flexible scheme. It doesn't really matter if people can
do
it for a day, a month, or a year, I believe that these inter-organization exchanges could have great value.
*Background*
Earlier this year the WMF's Multimedia team, which I'm a part of, had a volunteer working full-time with us, Aaron Arcos. Aaron used to work at Google and left to spend a year offering his software engineering skills
to
several non-profits. His work with us, bringing his experience from large projects at Google, was invaluable. He mentioned that when he told his former Google co-workers about his idea, some were interested and tempted to follow his example.
As some of you may now, Facebook is currently lending the WMF engineering resources in order to help with our HHVM deployment to production.
From my subjective perspective, as someone who's paid to be a software engineer, I would definitely enjoy the ability to do something like that
at
certain points of my career. There's always a lot to learn by being
thrown
into the deep end of another organization's software development.
In fact, in the corporate world, Twitter and Etsy have identified these benefits and are doing this between themselves:
http://thenextweb.com/insider/2012/09/11/twitter-etsy-run-engineer-exchange-...
In our own wiki world, we have Wikipedians in residence: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedian_in_residence
*The idea*
This is my take on it, and I'm really interested to hear some feedback
and
brainstorm on this. I think that starting talking to interested parties will be what gives shape and structure to the idea.
First and foremost I would see this outreach aimed at the engineers themselves. Because worst case scenario, if their employer isn't willing
to
donate continued payroll for that person while they're in residence, we should facilitate people like Aaron Arcos who are willing to donate their time and skills entirely for free. There may be engineers out there at
the
Googles and Facebooks of the world who don't know or might forget that
they
could help projects like mediawiki greatly if they took a break from
their
job and worked on open source for a while.
Secondly, I think that such a scheme would be easily pitched to companies (including other non-profits) as a training opportunity. As much as experienced engineers coming into the project have a lot to teach us, we also have a lot of interesting knowledge to teach in return, and the experience of working on this codebase alone, the scale of the traffic we're dealing with, etc., can have incredible training value.
I imagine this scheme as being entirely flexible. For a short period or a long period, still paid by their former employer or not, we should foster experienced engineers participating in our project for a period of time.
We
already participate in outreach to people with less experienced
developers
through GSoC and similar (maybe we're not doing enough of that for some people, but that's another topic!), and I think there is an unexplored opportunity in trying to do this with experienced folks.
Lastly, while everything I describe here is probably possible on an individual basis and does happen occasionally, I believe that having a catchy name (eg. "engineers in residence"), and an official scheme for it would greatly increase the frequency of it happening.
I could keep going on and on about this, but let's see what others think based on this rough idea. And if you're at Wikimania right now and are interested in discussing this topic, find me. _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
On Sat, Aug 9, 2014 at 5:22 PM, dan-nl dan.entous.wikimedia@gmail.com wrote:
this is an excellent idea and i don't think it needs to be focused only on large corporations or only on corporate individuals who want to volunteer. i would suggest opening the idea to any developer with a skill set that's needed or who wants to learn.
Actually, I think we should consider serious limits to any such proposal, such as (as Gilles suggested) working only with reputable employees (or ex-employees, like Aaron Arcos) of reputable companies. Otherwise I suspect "any developer" will game the system for their own benefit, for example to get free training or to pad their resume.
On 10 August 2014 13:57, Chris McMahon cmcmahon@wikimedia.org wrote:
Actually, I think we should consider serious limits to any such proposal, such as (as Gilles suggested) working only with reputable employees (or ex-employees, like Aaron Arcos) of reputable companies. Otherwise I suspect "any developer" will game the system for their own benefit, for example to get free training or to pad their resume.
I would ordinarily be vary wary about limiting or restricting who we collaborate with, but given that our code base is open source and we welcome patches from everyone, making such a limitation seems workable for the very practical purpose of making sure the relationships are as productive as possible.
Thanks, Dan
personally i really liked your comparison, when we were chatting the other day, to an artist in residence -- imo, programmers are the artists of our time and this matches well.
Absolutely, I also like that idea of doing something similar to artist residencies. This could take many forms. The one I described in the opening of this thread is just one take on many angles that can be explored. I guess the most generic way to express the idea is setting up ways to remove the economical barriers preventing willing engineers from contributing (or contributing more) to our projects. It can be more than one scheme targeting people in very different situations. Some would cost the foundation/chapters money, some wouldn't, etc.
Also, I want to stress than I was talking about organizations in general, and that includes other non-profits that align with our ideals. Organizations like Mozilla, Creative Commons, FSF, etc. There are plenty of them, with employees of their own, and for those non-profits it could take the form of exchanges, for example (someone from the WMF spending X months contributing to Mozilla projects while someone from Mozilla contributes to Mediawiki projects, etc.). That's yet another take on this. To me the point is to have our engineering more open and collaborative, which in my opinion would also increase pure volunteer contributions as a side effect. This is very hard to do in anything other than a non-profit open source project, I think we're in a position to make very interesting things happen through such efforts.
On Sat, Aug 9, 2014 at 5:22 PM, dan-nl dan.entous.wikimedia@gmail.com wrote:
this is an excellent idea and i don't think it needs to be focused only on large corporations or only on corporate individuals who want to volunteer. i would suggest opening the idea to any developer with a skill set that's needed or who wants to learn. and make it available in any Foundation office or chapter office in the world. depending on the skill set or learning situation might determine if the person was paid for their time or volunteered it.
personally i really liked your comparison, when we were chatting the other day, to an artist in residence -- imo, programmers are the artists of our time and this matches well.
offering housing and a stipend for food would be a good thing to include when the person volunteers their time.
o dan
On Aug 9, 2014, at 15:44 , Gilles Dubuc gilles@wikimedia.org wrote:
It doesn't exclude the community, the community already contributes to
the
software. That's the point of open source. In fact I would expect that people who already contribute to mediawiki as hobby who are also software engineers as a day job would enjoy being given the freedom to work on
what
they're passionate about even more. The community as you describe it and people who work for corporations in order to pay their bills has a big overlap.
It would also be an opportunity to get valuable contributions from experienced people whose life constraints may not allow them to do this
as
a hobby. There's also a big difference in the nature of what you can contribute in your free time compared to a full-time basis.
On Sat, Aug 9, 2014 at 3:23 PM, svetlana svetlana@fastmail.com.au
wrote:
utter and complete rubbish as it excludes the community and leaves all development within corporate hands; All against free software philosophy and/or community involvement
programming should be a hobby, like editing articles
svetlana
On Sat, 9 Aug 2014, at 23:27, Gilles Dubuc wrote:
This is an idea I've had for a while, and I'd like to see if there's
any
interest, or on the contrary concerns, about it. I would like to
explore
(and if I have official blessing, champion) the idea of asking
corporations
with software engineering staff if they would be willing to let their employees volunteer their expertise and time to mediawiki while ideally still being on their employer's payroll. I mean engineering in the wide sense of the term, including Ops, QA, etc. and maybe even UX.
This would allow engineers to take a break for a predetermined duration from their usual work duties and contribute in a very productive manner
to
our open source projects. And maybe to other open source projects than mediawiki, but I think our project in particular is a great starting
point.
I see this as a flexible scheme. It doesn't really matter if people can
do
it for a day, a month, or a year, I believe that these
inter-organization
exchanges could have great value.
*Background*
Earlier this year the WMF's Multimedia team, which I'm a part of, had a volunteer working full-time with us, Aaron Arcos. Aaron used to work at Google and left to spend a year offering his software engineering
skills
to
several non-profits. His work with us, bringing his experience from
large
projects at Google, was invaluable. He mentioned that when he told his former Google co-workers about his idea, some were interested and
tempted
to follow his example.
As some of you may now, Facebook is currently lending the WMF
engineering
resources in order to help with our HHVM deployment to production.
From my subjective perspective, as someone who's paid to be a software engineer, I would definitely enjoy the ability to do something like
that
at
certain points of my career. There's always a lot to learn by being
thrown
into the deep end of another organization's software development.
In fact, in the corporate world, Twitter and Etsy have identified these benefits and are doing this between themselves:
http://thenextweb.com/insider/2012/09/11/twitter-etsy-run-engineer-exchange-...
In our own wiki world, we have Wikipedians in residence: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedian_in_residence
*The idea*
This is my take on it, and I'm really interested to hear some feedback
and
brainstorm on this. I think that starting talking to interested parties will be what gives shape and structure to the idea.
First and foremost I would see this outreach aimed at the engineers themselves. Because worst case scenario, if their employer isn't
willing
to
donate continued payroll for that person while they're in residence, we should facilitate people like Aaron Arcos who are willing to donate
their
time and skills entirely for free. There may be engineers out there at
the
Googles and Facebooks of the world who don't know or might forget that
they
could help projects like mediawiki greatly if they took a break from
their
job and worked on open source for a while.
Secondly, I think that such a scheme would be easily pitched to
companies
(including other non-profits) as a training opportunity. As much as experienced engineers coming into the project have a lot to teach us,
we
also have a lot of interesting knowledge to teach in return, and the experience of working on this codebase alone, the scale of the traffic we're dealing with, etc., can have incredible training value.
I imagine this scheme as being entirely flexible. For a short period
or a
long period, still paid by their former employer or not, we should
foster
experienced engineers participating in our project for a period of
time.
We
already participate in outreach to people with less experienced
developers
through GSoC and similar (maybe we're not doing enough of that for some people, but that's another topic!), and I think there is an unexplored opportunity in trying to do this with experienced folks.
Lastly, while everything I describe here is probably possible on an individual basis and does happen occasionally, I believe that having a catchy name (eg. "engineers in residence"), and an official scheme for
it
would greatly increase the frequency of it happening.
I could keep going on and on about this, but let's see what others
think
based on this rough idea. And if you're at Wikimania right now and are interested in discussing this topic, find me. _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
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On Sun, Aug 10, 2014 at 2:47 PM, Gilles Dubuc gilles@wikimedia.org wrote:
personally i really liked your comparison, when we were chatting the
other
day, to an artist in residence -- imo, programmers are the artists of our time and this matches well.
To me the point is to have our engineering more open and collaborative, which in my opinion would also increase pure volunteer contributions as a side effect. This is very hard to do in anything other than a non-profit open source project, I think we're in a position to make very interesting things happen through such efforts.
Such good timing. As a direct result of meeting at Wikimania (thanks Nik Everett), here is an expert from Expedia who would like to contribute to our security efforts. He has posted to the QA mail list: http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/qa/2014-August/001847.html
On Sun, 2014-08-10 at 00:23 +1000, svetlana wrote:
utter and complete rubbish as it excludes the community and leaves all development within corporate hands; All against free software philosophy and/or community involvement
I don't appreciate the language you used. Assume that people mean well, please?
programming should be a hobby, like editing articles
Free Software definitions don't imply that you shall not take money for your work, or eventually even make a living on it. It's part of the personal freedom that everybody has. However, nobody stops you from living your ideals of keeping programming a "hobby only". :)
Cheers, andre
+1 to everything Andre said.
-Chad On Aug 9, 2014 7:05 PM, "Andre Klapper" aklapper@wikimedia.org wrote:
On Sun, 2014-08-10 at 00:23 +1000, svetlana wrote:
utter and complete rubbish as it excludes the community and leaves all development within corporate hands; All against free software philosophy and/or community involvement
I don't appreciate the language you used. Assume that people mean well, please?
programming should be a hobby, like editing articles
Free Software definitions don't imply that you shall not take money for your work, or eventually even make a living on it. It's part of the personal freedom that everybody has. However, nobody stops you from living your ideals of keeping programming a "hobby only". :)
Cheers, andre -- Andre Klapper | Wikimedia Bugwrangler http://blogs.gnome.org/aklapper/
Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
On Sun, 10 Aug 2014, at 04:04, Andre Klapper wrote:
programming should be a hobby, like editing articles
Free Software definitions don't imply that you shall not take money for your work, or eventually even make a living on it. It's part of the personal freedom that everybody has. However, nobody stops you from living your ideals of keeping programming a "hobby only". :)
Cheers, andre -- Andre Klapper | Wikimedia Bugwrangler http://blogs.gnome.org/aklapper/
I feel that having development carried out by "employees" hinders programming the same software as a hobby: for instance, they work in a single language, and don't need localised documentation
there are other (which i haven't shaped properly yet) differences of architecture of comminity-run tech projects and tech projects run by employees, which make getting involved as a hobby harder
for instance, i could not make a difference to a big linux distro run by a corporation (or using one as an upstream)
which is why I'm not very supportive of any plans that involve more employees at WMF Engineering either
I hope this way to put it is slightly more clear than it was before
svetlana
On Sun, Aug 10, 2014 at 9:27 AM, svetlana svetlana@fastmail.com.au wrote:
I feel that having development carried out by "employees" hinders programming the same software as a hobby: for instance, they work in a single language, and don't need localised documentation
Good localized software is a commitment of the project/community/coders, irrespective of coder's employment statuses.
I have certainly worked on software which was localized *only because* a company paid people to do the localization. And, of course, I'm sure the converse occurs as well.
As a software engineer who enjoys his work, I'm rather put off by the idea that it is somehow wrong for me to make a living using my skills to further a cause I believe in. Are all employees of non-profits somehow polluting the non-profit's ideals?
I contributed code to mediawiki as a volunteer before I became an employee. I did not have any problems doing so. It is true that some "community" projects have trouble accepting contributions from non-employees, but this is not the case for WMF in my experience. But again, this is due to the values and commitment of the community/organization, not who is (or is not) being paid. --scott
+1 Scott
As a new hire at WMF, I consider it to be a privilege to be doing work that supports the efforts of the community and the movement, but I am also proud of the fact that what I am doing allows me to support my family without compromising my personal values. Doing good and making a living are not mutually exclusive and not everyone has the luxury of coding purely as a hobby.
From what I have seen, most of the engineers who work at the foundation could easily get higher paying jobs elsewhere, but they choose to work at WMF because they believe in the movement and its mission. To imply that these people's contributions are somehow less ethical or meaningful because they get paid seems to be rather uninformed and frankly a little offensive. Furthermore, as someone who has been working in the localization field for over five years, I can validate Scott’s point that how much attention a given coder gives to localization has more to do with his or her personal integrity and commitment to that end than anything about his or her employment status. This holds generally for other aspects of software development, I would argue.
With the proper legal structures in place, I see no reason why an “Engineer in Residence” program at WMF could not succeed. Having such a program would not only provide an influx of engineering talent (without adding more WMF employees), it might also allow us to positively influence the culture of several corporate entities, which would seem to be a good thing.
Joel
On Aug 10, 2014, at 2:32 PM, C. Scott Ananian cananian@wikimedia.org wrote:
On Sun, Aug 10, 2014 at 9:27 AM, svetlana svetlana@fastmail.com.au wrote:
I feel that having development carried out by "employees" hinders programming the same software as a hobby: for instance, they work in a single language, and don't need localised documentation
Good localized software is a commitment of the project/community/coders, irrespective of coder's employment statuses.
I have certainly worked on software which was localized *only because* a company paid people to do the localization. And, of course, I'm sure the converse occurs as well.
As a software engineer who enjoys his work, I'm rather put off by the idea that it is somehow wrong for me to make a living using my skills to further a cause I believe in. Are all employees of non-profits somehow polluting the non-profit's ideals?
I contributed code to mediawiki as a volunteer before I became an employee. I did not have any problems doing so. It is true that some "community" projects have trouble accepting contributions from non-employees, but this is not the case for WMF in my experience. But again, this is due to the values and commitment of the community/organization, not who is (or is not) being paid. --scott
-- (http://cscott.net)
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Le 10/08/2014 10:27, svetlana a écrit :
I feel that having development carried out by "employees" hinders programming the same software as a hobby: for instance, they work in a single language, and don't need localised documentation
We have developers across all continents with a wide range of native languages. We just fallback to a common language which happens to be English.
If the computer industry started in France, we would probably all be using french to communicate and that would become a de facto requirement. Keep in mind that all languages are based on English and most of their documentation / source code comments are also in English.
I definitely understand how it is a barrier of entry for a hobbyist developer, but lack of English skill is a different problem which is out of scope of our mission. The way we mitigate it is that we have developers fluent in a bunch of languages and, I at least, enjoy helping/replying/guiding developers in our native language.
As for our documentation, the user/sysadmin guides are on mediawiki.org. That has been done for a reason: let folks document MediaWiki instead of the overbusy developers. That also opens possibilities to at least translate the user/sysadmin guides.
Regarding the documentation shipped inside Mediawiki core, it is based on source code comments and I don't see us maintaining a translation for them. We don't even properly maintain our doc as-is!
there are other (which i haven't shaped properly yet) differences of architecture of comminity-run tech projects and tech projects run by employees, which make getting involved as a hobby harder
for instance, i could not make a difference to a big linux distro run by a corporation (or using one as an upstream)
which is why I'm not very supportive of any plans that involve more employees at WMF Engineering either
I hope this way to put it is slightly more clear than it was before
I am not sure how it applies to MediaWiki development process. We have a fair share of volunteers involved, and more than a handful of them that have very deep knowledge about wiki and propose very useful code. There are some area of codes I would ask volunteers to review, I trust them more than myself or other employees to handle the review and make sure it is not going to break the Wikimedia cluster.
For beginners developers, the barrier entry is much higher. I agree. But I think it is more related to how complicated MediaWiki is than some localization issues or WMF having paid employees.
On 08/09/2014 03:27 PM, Gilles Dubuc wrote:
This is an idea I've had for a while, and I'd like to see if there's any interest, or on the contrary concerns, about it. I would like to explore (and if I have official blessing, champion) the idea of asking corporations with software engineering staff if they would be willing to let their employees volunteer their expertise and time to mediawiki while ideally still being on their employer's payroll. I mean engineering in the wide sense of the term, including Ops, QA, etc. and maybe even UX.
This is an idea I (of course) support.
Last June, WikimediaCH has participated for the first time to the Google serve day in Zurich. Although the "first time" effect, a small dozen of bugs were fixed an feature implemented, mainly in Kiwix (in particular Kiwix for Android) but a few one in Mediawiki too.
The experience was positive for both sides (Google and WikimediaCH). Thus, we will do it again next year and plan to provide a way for non-swiss located Google engineers to participate to the effort.
Emmanuel
Hi,
On Sat, Aug 9, 2014 at 2:27 PM, Gilles Dubuc gilles@wikimedia.org wrote:
asking corporations with software engineering staff if they would be willing to let their employees volunteer their expertise and time to mediawiki while ideally still being on their employer's payroll. I mean engineering in the wide sense of the term, including Ops, QA, etc. and maybe even UX.
SocialCoding4Good puts in touch companies with open source projects. We are nominally collaborating for a couple of years now, although for a reason or another we haven't go any volunteers. See http://www.socialcoding4good.org/organizations/wikimedia
From the WMF side we haven't insisted much either, partially because of our
growth in internships via outreach programs, partially because I wasn't sure how willing would be our dev teams to try this model (this was before Aron Arcos joined us as volunteer). If you are interested, we can ping them back.
wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org