[Wikimedia-l] Board vote on narrowing focus

[Erik Moeller]

On Fri, Nov 2, 2012 at 4:05 AM, Lodewijk <lodewijk at effeietsanders.org> wrote:

> The question I am missing in this analysis (but perhaps it was discussed
> orally) is 'which organization/group/individual is best placed to execute
> this' and then I definitely agree that many events etc are probably better
> executed at a chapter level than by the WMF.

\o/

I really like this part of the strategy. I'd love to see more small
hackathons around the world organized by chapters and attended by
smaller groups of WMF staff along with volunteers and chapters staff.

> I do have one more specific question. In discussions previously on meta,
> there were some insinuations (maybe only my interpretation) that the
> organizational support (so not just money) for chapters and other
> affiliated groups would be reduced as a consequence of this narrowed focus.

I can speak mostly for the tech side, where our general approach is to
try to ensure that we've got scalable review/integration processes
that advance as much trust and autonomy to other individuals and
organizations as reasonably possible. For example I think WMF needs to
make sure that Labs runs smoothly, and can be used to build tools from
start to the finish line. We may then still have to help pushing it
over the last few inches, but most of the work should not require our
help.

Similarly we're continually expanding the "circle of trust" for folks
who can review and merge code. We're a bit more conservative with the
final "deployment" button push, but we're pretty close to letting
anyone with the right talents and inclinations push code into
production.

Where WMF really is the only older of certain expertise, we try to
provided it when needed, but we should also make a continuing effort
to reduce expertise bottlenecks. The changes in this regard over the
last 2 years have been huge -- more of our infrastructure than ever is
now versioned as code and testable in Labs.

Erik

-- 
Erik Möller
VP of Engineering and Product Development, Wikimedia Foundation

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