[Foundation-l] tech team - content community bottleneck

[Chad]

In every business, there /needs/ to be a go-to in between developers and end
users, plain and simple. That's not to say that end users are necessarily
tech-illiterate, or that the techies can't "dumb it down" for the end users. All
it says is that the job of the developer and the community are two different
entities looking at different goals. Sometimes (obviously, such as this), there
is a communications breakdown in between the two groups. People begin
talking past each other, and a lot of information gets lost in the process. In
my organization where I work, we have 1 or 2 people per department who's job
it is to work with IT. IT goes to them when they need to get tech stuff done
within a department, and the departments go to them when they need things
from IT.

Such a position would benefit the Foundation, I would think. Someone who is
tech-oriented but can still work with the end user (in this case, the
communities).
Facilitation of new features by developers isn't necessarily hard when the end
user makes it clear what they want.

Chad H.

On Jan 11, 2008 12:51 PM, Domas Mituzas <midom.lists at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi!
>
> > Correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe the developer who made the
> > switch
> > is not an employee of the Wikimedia Foundation. Take it to wikitech-
> > l or
> > wikien-l, please.
>
>
> Well, there is quite a bit of foundation issue here, and I'd like to
> explaim some general projects bits (that are neither technology, nor
> single-project related):
>
> See, Jens is not employee, though has been the developer with most
> community-facing attitude. He has been implementing, at his own will,
> most of community requests. He is a volunteer, and has been dedicated
> to our ideals more and longer than most of us.
> When members of communities decide to attack with "This developer has
> exhibited extremely poor judgment and a gross disregard for the
> WIkipedia community" and nobody takes that back or apologizes, it is
> no fun to continue doing all these small things.
>
> Foundation doesn't really facilitate this process at the moment - it
> is all left to individual care - both filtering, evaluating if change
> X would successfully follow all few hundreds policy pages, and
> implementation, what often requires extensive code review and
> familiarity of our operating environment.
> Do note, that community representatives come not only with these
> changes - various 'oh noes, remove this from site' requests are quite
> common, and every of them are questionable.
>
> If people will be going to raise such huge flames and attack
> implementors for actually doing the job, we will really ask
> foundation to facilitate not only all the evaluation of every request
> that comes in from communities, but to provide with implementor
> resources too.
>
> We have far more fun things (our jobs, lives, even wikipedia
> technology development) to do than go into endless debates with
> people who favor endless debates, sorry.
>
> --
> Domas Mituzas -- http://dammit.lt/ -- [[user:midom]]
>
>
>
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