[Wikimedia-l] About the concentration of resources in SF (itwas: "Communication plans for community engagement"

[Quim Gil]

Let me skip the complex topic of decentralization of the WMF and let me 
focus on the quite simpler topic of chapters and other orgs assuming 
progressively more tech responsibilities:

On 08/24/2013 01:19 AM, Federico Leva (Nemo) wrote:
>> http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Mentorship_programs/Possible_projects

>> I don't see why the chapters couldn't consider this list as a source of
>> inspiration for software projects they could sponsor.
>
> Well, I see several possible reasons.
> 1) Some of them are definitely WMF-specific, like the bugzilla
> improvements. No reason for a chapter to even touch those.

office.wikimedia.org is WMF-specific. bugzilla.wikimedia.org is not. 
These projects list features that would benefit the whole community, not 
just the WMF.

Wikidata and Kiwix are mentioned as success stories of tech projects 
driven by chapters. Is Wikidata Germany-specific? Does Switzerland 
really need offine Wikipedia? No, these chapters decided to go beyond 
their strict duties and make a technical contribution just as useful to 
the rest of us.

> 2) Others rely heavily on WMF to be put in use, or interact/overlap
> heavily with current work by WMF. The list is very good because it
> provides a) proof of interest by WMF, b) a mentor who serves as contact
> with WMF to keep things on track and avoid clashes. However, several of
> those projects, if completed, could still sit on a dead end like many
> GSoC projects in the past.

 From the 20 ongoing projects, all of them are generating code that has 
a place in the Wikimedia servers. This is no coincidence: we set strong 
filters during the selection process to avoid all these problems you are 
mentioning.

To anybody willing to take a tech project: just ask or share your plans 
in advance to make sure your contributions will be as useful for the 
community as you expect.

> Typically, a chapter would be interested either because "its" language
> communities have a particular interest in something, or as a part of
> some other project of the chapter (Commons improvements are probably the
> easiest to fit in here).

Sure, I'm just trying to encourage chapters and other orgs to ask their 
communities about tech projects they would like to help developing. And 
to consider budget, grants, hackathons etc to complete those projects. 
If these orgs don't do this then any tech decentralization will be harder.

-- 
Quim Gil
Technical Contributor Coordinator @ Wikimedia Foundation
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Qgil