Hi Gryllida,
On Tue, Aug 5, 2014 at 12:33 PM, Gryllida gryllida@fastmail.fm wrote:
Could we please have some more people (potentially a dedicated ‘community’ team) who could do these things:
The tasks you describe would or could fall into the responsibilities of two teams at the WMF:
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Community_Engagement_(Product) https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Engineering_Community_Team
Also the own development teams (including product managers) are involved in some of these activities, as part of their development and deployment process.
- encourage feedback by absolutely /anyone/ about the next features they'd
like,
Betas and Bugzilla today. Phabricator should make it easier to provide feedback in a wider range of topics, not only "bugs".
- 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],
I for one would welcome more initiatives and requests from the community. The PyWikiBot is a good example of a team that asks us to help organizing and promoting their special activities. More proposals are welcome.
- encourage localising documentation for, and centralising the location
of, all community-developed programming work,
Nemo has been a very active advocate, and I want to believe that WMF teams have been increasingly relying on centralized and translatable documentation in their releases, asking explicitly for translation help.
- raise awareness of community development efforts across all Wikimedia
projects,
This is an explicit goal for Tech Ambassadors and Community Liaisons.
- actively encourage members of community become MediaWiki and Gadgets
hackers in the Free Software philosophy?
Ah, you are touching a point of my personal ToDo list that I know we are not addressing as well as we could. Still, we are trying to focus this line of activity in conjunction with our participation in Google Summer of Code, FOSS Outreach Program for Women, and recently also Google Code-in and Facebook Open Academy.
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).
To me this is not a task of one team or two, but a set of practices better embodies in our development and deployment processes, and also a set of activities that a larger community should embrace.
In fact, this is what my Wikimania session is about! Shameless plug:
https://wikimania2014.wikimedia.org/wiki/Submissions/The_Wikimedia_open_sour...
(It was scheduled at the "Technology, Interface & Infrastructure" track but believe me, it's more about WikiCulture & Community.)
I'm curious about the subject of you message, especially the "let's elect people" part. What do you mean?