[Foundation-l] Pending Changes update for June 18

[Rob Lanphier]

Hi everyone,

As I'm sure you're all aware, the Pending Changes trial began earlier this
week, and seems to be off to a great start.  There are many issues to be
sorted out both on the community policy side and on the technical side, but
everyone here seems to grappling with the community issues without a lot of
prodding.  On the development front, the team now has a blissfully mundane
software maintenance/incremental improvement process to deal with, as
opposed to feeling antsy about needing to deploy.

With the launch out of the way, William is now wrapping up and turning the
project management reigns over to me.  When I first started contracting with
WMF back in the beginning of May, I had the mistaken assumption that I'd be
taking over then, since William had/has another huge opportunity that is
looming on the horizon that appeared likely to take 100% of his time.  In
our first meeting as we started going over the transition, he resolutely
pointed out "no, I'm staying until we deploy this, however long it takes".
 We are really glad he was able to stick with us through this, and we're
extremely grateful for his tenacity and commitment.  This feature would
likely have been delayed longer and would have missed many critical details
without him.  I learned a lot about project management working with him, and
enjoyed it a great deal.  Thanks William!

The main developers, (Aaron and Chad) plan to continue knocking down issues
as they discover them, as well as continuing to whittle down the backlog of
issues we postponed until after the initial deployment:
http://www.pivotaltracker.com/projects/46157

Some of the most significant work surrounds the "reject" button an a few
related tweaks.  Since the topic of how exactly to optimize the workflow is
still a subject of debate, we'd appreciate some feedback on the subject.
 The features in question are all linked to from here:
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:FlaggedRevs/Specifications

The trial itself is slated to last until August 15.  After that, community
consensus will be required to leave the feature on permanently.  A strict
reading of the proposed trial would suggest we're obligated to turn the
feature off immediately around August 15, but I've seen at least one comment
suggesting we leave it on that time.  I've proposed here that we instead
leave the feature turned on while we discuss the permanent status:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Pending_changes/Trial#leaverunningforvote

If you have any concerns that need the dev team's attention, please bring
them up here:
http://flaggedrevs.labs.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia:Pending_Changes_issues

We're a little behind in looking at that page, but we will get back to you
if you post there.  We'll also get back to you if you prefer to post to
Bugzilla:
https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/enter_bug.cgi?product=MediaWiki%20extensions&component=FlaggedRevs

That's all for now.  Thanks for reading!
Rob
p.s. I didn't want to turn this email into a parody of an overly-long Oscar
speech, but I also did want to specially call out Aaron Schulz, the lead
developer on this project, who did a remarkable job developing and preparing
the software for this launch as well as making sure that any problems that
we did inadvertently introduced were knocked down extremely quickly (often
within minutes of finding out).  Great work, Aaron!