Hi Pine, thank you for your feedback. Some responses inline below:
On Apr 3, 2018, at 7:41 AM, Pine W
<wiki.pine(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Hi Victoria,
I hope that you are OK with discussing this announcement on Wikimedia-l, which seems to
me to be the most applicable mailing list for my questions.
I have two questions and one comment.
I think that I understand the desires here. However, it is unfortunate that a likely side
effect of this scheduling is an increase in total costs and time spent traveling for those
who will attend this conference and WMF All Hands, and additional costs from the
lengthening of the All Hands conference. Since there are so many options for remote
collaboration for WMF staff for follow up to All Hands discussions, and the additional
costs for these combined changes sound likely to be in the tens to hundreds of thousands
of dollars, I am less than enthusiastic about this aspect. Can you explain the
cost-benefit analysis further,
Our aim is to keep the travel costs flat from year to year. For Wikimedia Foundation's
engineering teams, other events to be taken into account in this equation are the
Wikimedia Hackathon and separate team offsites. The extended AllHands in January 2019 will
allow for more team offsites co-located, being both types of events Wikimedia Foundation
internal. Participation in the Hackathon and the Tech Conference (both events open to
Wikimedians and third parties) is expected to be more balanced. We believe that this
combination will allow us to participate at the WMF & teams AllHands, the Tech
Conference and the Hackathon in more focused and consistent ways, getting better results
from each event.
and why remote collaboration options at much lower
cost are inadequate for extending the conversations from All Hands?
Remote collaboration is our default way of working. Most if not all engineering teams are
partially or totally remote, and their day to day communications are based on chats,
hangouts and asynchronous conversations. We believe that adding a few more days around
these events for face to face interaction will result in much better understanding and
decisions around the many complex problems that our current plans and our future strategy
is demanding us to solve.
Please ensure that the dates for this conference
don't conflict with Wiki Conference North America.
I believe there is overlap of one day between the two events. On the other hand, the
participation in each of these events has almost no overlap, according to the data from
past editions.
The cap of 50 participants, as stated on the MediaWiki
page, seems to me to be low given the stated goals of the conference. Have you considered
a higher cap?
Yes, and we discarded it. We are serious about keeping travel costs flat, and this is
achieved through decisions like this one. In previous versions, the Developer Summit has
increased online participation before, during, and after the event. This cap of 50
participants is necessary from a budget point of view, but it also contributes to tighter
collaboration and results assuming that these participants represent a critical mass of
stakeholders in the subjects discussed. We are planning to improve the dynamics and impact
of online participation open to anyone prior to the event (see Outcome 4 and its related
outputs in our International Developer Events program
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Technical_Collaboration/Annual_Plan_2018-19#International_developer_events>).
Thanks,
Pine
(
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Pine )
-------- Original message --------From: Victoria Coleman <vcoleman(a)wikimedia.org>
Date: 4/2/18 4:46 PM (GMT-08:00) To: "Staff (All)"
<wmfall(a)lists.wikimedia.org>rg>, MediaWiki announcements and site admin list
<mediawiki-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org> Subject: [MediaWiki-l] Announcing the Wikimedia
Technical Conference
Hi everyone.
This is a time of important change for technology and the Wikimedia movement. We are
evolving our platform to better support, grow, and prepare the movement for the future to
realize our strategic goals of Knowledge as a Service and Knowledge Equity.
Our vision is to host a different type of event in 2018 — to make informed decisions in
the evolution of our platform while building our technical community engagement and
enhancing our product vision. We want to be able to gather and discuss to determine our
future direction and that of our shared platform; to communicate more broadly our product
vision and to build a solid and stable base for our volunteer developer community. Future
years will have have different focuses and themes.
We also want to learn from our experiences during previous technically oriented events to
improve our focus, enhance outcomes, and to give ourselves the time and space to have
informed, substantive, and timely conversations — this all starts with the overall theme
of the event.
The January 2018 Developer Summit (in Berkeley, California) event had a broad goal to
look at ways that technology can support our strategic direction. A concrete outcome of
those discussions was acknowledging the need to evolve our core platform for the road
ahead. In light of that outcome, we will hold future events with themes that reflect our
evolving priorities and opportunities to support and enhance the Wikimedia movement with
technology. Therefore, our next technical event will be focused on Platform Evolution.
We will hold a 4 day conference with topics that pertain to the Platform Evolution goals
that we want to achieve in the next 3 to 5 years with a shared understanding of the
product vision around those goals while also enhancing technical engagement within the
Foundation and embracing and empowering our large community of volunteer developers.
Day 1: Product driven discussions on the how’s and why’s of our shared goals.
Day 2 & 3: A deep dive into specific technical ideas, concerns, and outcomes around
the newly formed Platform Evolution cross-departmental program.
Day 4: An unconference / ‘get stuff done’ format along with sessions on building and
sustaining our developer community.
We are also moving the time of year that we’ll hold this new event. The previously
established timeframe had been in January, typically adjacent to the annual Foundation All
Hands gathering, to allow for co-location of events. However, feedback from both the
DevSummit and All Hands participants indicates that both events need more time to
accomplish their goals. All Hands is a once-a-year event that many teams use to come
together, face to face, for working meetings; as well as the entire Foundation getting
together for meetings. Going forward, we will decouple the DevSummit from All Hands, to
give both gatherings the time and space that all attendees need to be productive and
successful.
This first of the event series will take place in Q2 of our fiscal year 2018-2019, in
October 2018, and will be held in Portland, OR, USA. This timing was chosen to give us the
opportunity to formulate plans, proposals, and programs in time for the Foundation annual
planning cycle which starts in January 2019.
Since we have a new focus and want to expand upon the successes of the Developer Summit
events from years past — we will now call this gathering of like-minded technologists the
Wikimedia Technical Conference (WM TechCon). Stay tuned for more information on the
formation of the program committee and the participant’s selection process, as we are
making quite a few changes based on the feedback collected from previous events.
Make sure to follow the event’s mediawiki page
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Technical_Conference/2018> for more
details.
Best wishes,
Victoria Coleman
Chief Technology Officer
Wikimedia Foundation
1 Montgomery Street, Suite 1600
San Francisco, CA 94104
+1-650-703-8112
vcoleman(a)wikimedia.org
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