On 5 August 2014 12:05, Gryllida gryllida@fastmail.fm wrote:
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...
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).
You mean like the tech ambassadors? https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Tech/Ambassadors
One thing to keep in mind is that English Wikipedia is only one of hundreds of projects. The technology and engineering groups generally work at a global level because they affect all projects; it's rare that they're doing something for one project only.
There are lots of opportunities for community members to interact and to test software in advance (the "beta" preferences are but one of them) - but when discussing a global project or process or software, the best place to discuss is rarely going to be a single page on a single non-global project.
Risker/Anne