That's funny, there's also an active reading group looking into flatter
organizational structures. I think we're maybe ready for a more official
lack of hierarchy, or at least a more solid acknowledgement that it's
flexibility that makes us strong and it should be cherished.
On Tue, Feb 23, 2016 at 10:01 PM, Dario Taraborelli <
dtaraborelli(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:
Brion,
there was a very constructive, heartfelt session on models of bottom-up
open innovation at this year's WMF All Hands. You can find extensive notes
from this session on the Office Wiki ("Embracing skunkworks") which I
encourage you to read and that I'd love to share publicly in a more
readable format at some point.
There are obvious tradeoffs between allowing more flexibility on the one
hand and making sure we have a reasonable budget plan, accountability to
donors and stakeholders and appropriate resource allocation on the other
hand, but I believe this model would work much better than the current one,
at least for projects that are not core initiatives.
Skunkworks is what got us revision scoring, EventLogging, countless
initiatives by TechOps and innovative MediaWiki extensions.
Dario
On Tue, Feb 23, 2016 at 6:14 PM, Yuri Astrakhan <yastrakhan(a)wikimedia.org>
wrote:
Does it make sense to have an "Incubator
team" ("Bell Labs" if you will),
whose core competency is to nurture small projects? When projects are
mature and need to switch into maintenance mode, they move under the
umbrella of a different team.
On Wed, Feb 24, 2016 at 5:06 AM, Brion Vibber <bvibber(a)wikimedia.org>
wrote:
On Feb 23, 2016 5:52 PM, "Dan
Andreescu" <dandreescu(a)wikimedia.org>
wrote:
> >
> > but also, some projects that were not so useful, sure. But we learn,
> move
> > on, we're not the first group of people to make mistakes : )
>
> Yep... High-tech organizations call it "failing fast".
>
> -- Brion
>
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