Hi everyone,
I had intended to send this email prior to our weekly meeting this week, but I ran out of time to send it. I believe I covered all of the major points in our meeting, but I'll send what I had drafted anyway just in case I missed something important.
As you all know, we've had a bit of a muddled planning process leading up to our quarterly reviews, which has evolved to be something like the following:
1. We have an ideas list page[1] 2. About a month out from the quarterly review, I ask everyone to put what they would like to be working on in a spreadsheet broken down by month[2] 3. We have discussions about what the "big" project should be 4. We refine that into a wiki page[3], consolidating and pruning the spreadsheet 5. We boil that down into a slide deck, and present our plan at the quarterly review.
One big problem with that process is the ideas list is a vague, undifferentiated list of random items, some hugely important, some trivial, and some too vague to assign priority to. Another big problem is that it's unclear to others exactly how to influence our plan. It's probably even unclear within the team.
Dan, Howie and I met earlier, and we'd like to propose something a bit different. We'd like to achieve some important improvements:
* Have a well-groomed, well-vetted backlog of possible projects with basic priority levels (e.g. high, medium, low) and reasonable introductory descriptions for the high-level projects. * Hold ourselves accountable to getting the non-emergency things we work on on the list * More methodical gathering of input from other parts of the organization
How we hope to accomplish this is to have a regular (probably fortnightly) meeting to flesh out high priority ideas and triage low priority ones. We'll make sure everything that is listed as high priority meets a standard of completeness with respect to its description and rationale. We'll more explicitly solicit input from other parts of the organization on what the most important things are from their perspective. We'll then consider only those things the team agrees are high priority as work for the coming quarter, and use our existing process to narrow things down to the final plan.
Dan has posted the proposed process to mediawiki.org, which you can read here: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_MediaWiki_Core_Team/Backlog/Process...
The actual backlog would live here: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_MediaWiki_Core_Team/Backlog
Dan will lead this process, but the actual decision-making will be team consensus driven by Tim and Dan. If there's a hopeless stalemate, I'll step in with an arbitrary, ill-informed decision that everyone will hate. Don't make me do it. :-)
Let's do some on-wiki tweaking/discussion during the week, and then finalize something at our weekly meeting next week.
Make sense? Rob
[1] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_MediaWiki_Core_Team/Ideas_list [2] MW Core Allocations sheet: https://docs.google.com/a/wikimedia.org/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0Agte_lJNpi-OdEZ... [3] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_MediaWiki_Core_Team/Quarterly_revie...