On the RFC Process talk page, I'm presenting some questions about our RFC process and suggesting *my* answers: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Talk:Requests_for_comment/Process#Process_que... may find this super boring and I will not blame you if you skip the whole discussion, but I may ask some of you personally to give your thoughts on specific questions.
Big questions include:
Should we just have one RFC process, or a few different processes (to fast-track some proposals, divide them up by core/mobile/language/UX/apps or something like that, etc.)? Should we add time limits to any part of the process? How do we ensure that WMF does not do all the decision-making?
I'd love to keep discussion on that talkpage - please feel free to rearrange into sections if you think it makes sense!
Sumana Harihareswara Engineering Community Manager Wikimedia Foundation
On Wed, 15 Jan 2014, at 4:52, Sumana Harihareswara wrote:
On the RFC Process talk page, I'm presenting some questions about our RFC process and suggesting *my* answers:
Where can I find previous RFCs? It's a thing I haven't heard of before. How are contributors expected to find it?
Gryllida
On 01/14/2014 04:21 PM, Gryllida wrote:
On Wed, 15 Jan 2014, at 4:52, Sumana Harihareswara wrote:
On the RFC Process talk page, I'm presenting some questions about our RFC process and suggesting *my* answers:
Where can I find previous RFCs?
They are listed at https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Requests_for_comment .
Matt Flaschen
Sumana Harihareswara wrote:
On the RFC Process talk page, I'm presenting some questions about our RFC process and suggesting *my* answers: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Talk:Requests_for_comment/Process
You've begun a discussion about changes to the process seemingly without making any attempt to discuss or define deficiencies or problems in the current process. Your talk page questions have every indication of a classic pattern in bug reporting, where a user shows up having a bit of knowledge and a proposed solution, but doesn't describe the symptoms or the problem or try to explain what he or she is trying to accomplish. Unsurprisingly, this approach often works very poorly.
As a direct example, you ask "Should we add time limits to any part of the process?" and then proceed to lay out your personal views on what an appropriate timeline might look like for RFCs. But taking a step back: what problem, exactly, are you trying to solve? This doesn't appear to be addressed anywhere on that talk page.
Almost all of the other sections/questions have the same issue.
On the talk page, you also reference an "architecture review committee" as though that's a real thing that exists. I'm not sure this is the case.
MZMcBride
Yo, MZ, did you miss the very first question, where I asked whether the current process is good enough? I'm totally cool with the answer "yeah it is" (except for numbering, I really want to be able to disambiguate RFCs on similar topics).
Sounds like you'd like more clarification on problems I'm seeing - sure, happy to talk about that, I'll see what needs adding. Other people who have interacted more thoroughly with the RFC process could also jump in. And it seems reasonable to me to ask whether specific ideas make sense for us. I've found that sometimes seeing what other similar communities do has given me ideas for how to improve our own processes -- sometimes we don't see a certain kind of problem until we see someone else solving it!
But whoa, harsh phrasings, dude. :(
Sumana Harihareswara Engineering Community Manager Wikimedia Foundation
On Tue, Jan 14, 2014 at 7:47 PM, MZMcBride z@mzmcbride.com wrote:
Sumana Harihareswara wrote:
On the RFC Process talk page, I'm presenting some questions about our RFC process and suggesting *my* answers: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Talk:Requests_for_comment/Process
You've begun a discussion about changes to the process seemingly without making any attempt to discuss or define deficiencies or problems in the current process. Your talk page questions have every indication of a classic pattern in bug reporting, where a user shows up having a bit of knowledge and a proposed solution, but doesn't describe the symptoms or the problem or try to explain what he or she is trying to accomplish. Unsurprisingly, this approach often works very poorly.
As a direct example, you ask "Should we add time limits to any part of the process?" and then proceed to lay out your personal views on what an appropriate timeline might look like for RFCs. But taking a step back: what problem, exactly, are you trying to solve? This doesn't appear to be addressed anywhere on that talk page.
Almost all of the other sections/questions have the same issue.
On the talk page, you also reference an "architecture review committee" as though that's a real thing that exists. I'm not sure this is the case.
MZMcBride
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