[Foundation-l] Foundation too passive, wasting community talent

[David Gerard]

On 5 April 2011 03:02, MZMcBride <z at mzmcbride.com> wrote:

> Another example might be an UploadWizard that is focused on
> ensuring that Wikimedia fulfills its Multimedia grant requirements rather
> than actually being fully developed and ready for use by Wikimedia Commons.
> These examples are off the top of my head, but anyone paying attention can
> see the trend fairly clearly, I think.


What I see is grants supplying money to get initiatives that have been
long-wanted happening. The near-impossibility of getting even quite
simple things through a bureaucratic kudzu-choked community process
has been noted on this list *many* times.

This is far from ideal, as you note. But in practical terms, I submit
it's better than this stuff never happening at all, which is what
would occur without it.

If I've correctly ascertained your essential point: you appear broadly
to think the WMF is becoming a self-sustaining creature *at the
expense* of the community; and you think it's getting bloated and
complacent. I think both of these are quite incorrect.


> The return of Brion as Lead Software
> Architect may change some of this, but only time will tell.


You phrase that as if that's a change in politics (I don't know if
that's what you intended, it's just how it comes across to me), but I
think it's more a factor of having *another senior developer*.

We really do underspend horribly in the tech area, compared to what we
need. That $14-16m from the fundraiser could be gobbled up in a
moment. In my day job, I work for a tiny, tiny publisher with an
approximately negligible web presence; two sysadmins, several
developers, about the same number of support staff; our department's
budget is bigger than WMF's entire budget. This mainstream website,
this *social institution*, still runs on cheese and string and crossed
fingers. Brilliant devs get paid at charity scale, not at what they
could get at Facebook or Google (which is fine, 'cos everyone needs
career progression, and a couple of years' WMF is resume gold).

(And I am not saying that I think we should sink the entire budget
into tech and neglect everything else, not at all - all the program
and liaison and fuzzy human stuff WMF does is necessary to deal with
the fact that we are in fact a social institution and have become part
of the fabric of society that people just assume is always there, and
only we seem to realise just how tiny and fragile WMF actually is.)

So, yeah. Good times ahead! Hopefully.


- d.