On Tue, 5 Aug 2014, at 20:48, Fæ wrote:
On 5 August 2014 11:33, Gryllida gryllida@fastmail.fm wrote:
Hi all.
WMF Engineering is currently composed of individual teams as documented at https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Engineering . These teams look after the software that faces us everyday, and often work together.
Could we please have some more people (potentially a dedicated ‘community’ team) who could do these things:
- encourage feedback by absolutely /anyone/ about the next features they'd like,
- run programming and documentation activities requested (or started) by community [there would be a lot of small projects, unlike the big ones the current Teams are working on],
- encourage localising documentation for, and centralising the location of, all community-developed programming work,
- raise awareness of community development efforts across all Wikimedia projects,
- actively encourage members of community become MediaWiki and Gadgets hackers in the Free Software philosophy?
This would be, in my view, a relatively small, collaboration-type team (with just half a handful of people for timezone coverage for IRC support).
Open to brainstorming and suggestions. I would compile thoughts into a wiki page afterwards to continue thinking on the idea.
The roles you describe seem to have a lot of overlap with what we might expect WMF volunteer coordinators / WMF community liaison employees to be busy with. Compare with:
- http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Job_openings/Volunteer_Development_Coord...
- http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Job_openings/Community_Liaison
Do you intend this to be an unpaid team of volunteers doing these tasks, or a end user group (in the Agile sense) that would be supported by employees and may themselves be paid for some activities?
Fae
"Both please"? [This is a question! This is a brainstorming thread.]
Some part of such group of people could be paid (like the job openings you linked), and a very vast part could be volunteer and supported by the said employees (and documentation).
Gryllida.