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

[Ashar Voultoiz]

On 18/03/11 23:28, Jan Kucera (Kozuch) wrote:
> Hi there,
>
> why is the Foundation so passive??? I have been since almost 5 years
> with various Wikimedia projects and I can really see NO PROGRESS from
> the side of the Foundation but more employees, 2 new blogs, new
> Vector skin and maybe MediaWiki performance tweaks.

Hi Jan
I am one of the volunteer software developer for MediaWiki.

Those are all important progresses! Do not forget back in 2006 the 
foundation was really small, it is the year we had to support an 
ENORMOUS growth of popularity, since them, we are still as popular and 
the website is still up.

The blogs makes easier to follow what is happening
Vector skin has been build up following a professional usability study.
The resource loader will save bandwidth, loading time and already let 
the developers enhance the site easily.

For software development, do not forget some months ago there was a 
great community crisis between staff and volunteers.  Looks like we have 
this sorted out, 1.17 is live and a release is coming.

 > My participation
> declined radically, because I can not feel any real support from the
> foundation. It is not 2006 anymore. Look at what other websites have
> done in 5 years and you realize they have undergone major redesigns.
> And as someone wrote here lately Wikipedia still seems so 2005. This
> is OK for an encyclopedia, but unfortunately the way volunteers work
> is stuck in 2005 too...

I agree with you: overall the website interface looks old. The Vector 
skin is a first step in enhancement, we now have to add new features to 
it to make it more like a 2011 website.  One possibility would be to 
list the best gadgets users have developed and merge them in the 
MediaWiki software for the benefit of everyone.
If you get other enhancement ideas, please submit them to bugzilla.  If 
you know PHP, try hacking in MediaWiki.  We have developers around to 
help you :-)

<snip LQT, fellowship>

> Sophisticated decision mechanism simply does not exist on a community
> level, and those on Foundation level are of little importance. Is it
> really that hard to launch an ideas bank (at ideas.wikimedia.org for
> example) to boil down what the community really needs instead of
> letting volunteers have endless discussions in wiki-style? Will
> someone finally realize that wiki is not the holy-grail of
> "collaboration" and maybe other tools are needed too?

An idea website much like the Dell site http://www.ideastorm.com/ or 
something like http://www.reddit.com/ would be a great thing. If it 
exists as an open source software, we can probably have it installed 
somewhere for testing.


> Videos are still not being offered in various bitrates which makes
> them unusable within the encyclopedia, etc. etc. There has been
> literally no progress at all from an established editor point of view
> and that is very depriving. Very little is done in supporting new
> projects creation, Data Commons being an example.

Saving a video and offering it in multiples bitrates require two things:
  - disk space
  - bandwidth

LOT OF DISK SPACE. I mean in the Petabyte or even Exabyte scale ranges. 
Totally different with your local computer or our current system, it 
needs software engineering to answer "simple" questions like:
  - what happens when a datacenter goes down
  - how do you backup the data
  - what are the legal impacts of having data in such or such country
  - how much space is required 3 months after deployment, 18 months and 
3 years?
  - how do we make it scales?
The good point is that was already identified as an action and is a work 
in progress.

Bandwidth, the main datacenter is in Florida wich does not have that 
many routes to the internet.  The new datacenter (nothing easy to build 
up) will be in Ashburn, Virginia which is one of the major world 
internet exchange point in the world.  I had been given the privilege of 
looking at the new architecture, and trust me, it is going to be an 
awesome structure for the future.

> I wish I had the power to change all these things, but unfortunately
> I do not. Of course, if I do not want to have endless discussion in
> wiki (or mailing list) -style...

You do have the power! The world as immensely changed in the last few 
years thanks to the internet.  Internet is just about connecting people 
and every little step is a change.  Get an idea, get community members 
sharing it then you can markets it, find developers and get it applied 
to the live site.

cheers,

-- 
Ashar Voultoiz