[Wikimedia-l] software projects for chapters, thematic orgs, and others

[Federico Leva (Nemo)]

Sumana Harihareswara, 29/08/2013 23:42:
> Nemo wrote on Aug 24:
>> I offer myself as example of bad responsible for a small
>> technical project by a chapter (WMIT) some years ago. We managed to help
>> Kiwix a bit but we miserably failed with (Wikisource/Wikibooks) books
>> management improvements: at some point I no longer had the time and
>> mental strength to discuss and make decisions about the money the board
>> had trusted me with; when I finally got the board to replace me, we
>> failed to get the new responsible begin and restart/complete the job,
>> till the board/assembly removed it from the annual budget.
>
> Nemo, I'm glad you mentioned this problem. What do you think would be
> necessary in order to make future WMIT tech initiatives successful?
> Mentorship from more experienced IT project managers? Frequent check-ins
> to find dropped tasks faster? Paid contractors for engineering or
> administration? I'm just giving ideas - maybe you have an idea of what
> you would do, if you could do this over again. (And thank you for
> trying, and for talking about failure openly.)

The main problems I can find are those I described (plus the legal 
bureaucracy of contracts/offers); I don't know in general what would 
actually help. An interesting approach is what chapters did with Europeana.

In the specific case, by spending a lot of effort on it I had managed to 
find a solution for all the biggest obstacles; in another period it 
could have just worked. As always, if you rely on a single volunteer for 
something and you don't have a replacement ready, a single moment of 
failure can bring the whole project down.
However, it would have been much easier, had we had internal (or 
"internalisable") competence to assess with confidence whether an offer 
makes sense from a technical and financial point of view. It's very hard 
to find it together with understanding of the fitness to the chapter's 
goals and without any COI.

Nemo

P.s.:

> I hope this is helpful (though long!). [...]

Long enough that I almost missed the question to me, especially given 
the 4th subject change of the thread + thread theft via References. ;)