2009/10/16 Platonides Platonides@gmail.com:
Strategy intends to learn which things are important, but just having a developer coming to the Village Pump to implement whatever the local community needs [and is reasonable] could make a difference.
I agree that we need a healthy mix of project-based work (where we identify priorities together, but WMF ultimately needs to make a call of where it wants to focus its resources) and reactive work that is about fixing or assigning small bugs, integrating existing community-built extensions or making toolserver hacks into core functionality, reviewing code, etc. This is why in addition to larger scale project-based work and project contracts, we also are growing our core team. The recently posted Code Maintenance Engineer position falls into the core team category:
http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Job_openings/Code_Maintenance_Engineer
We have additional positions budgeted later in the year, and if the fundraiser performs according to plan, we'll continue to expand both project and core capacity. I think even if WMF were 10 times as large as it is, though, we'd still have many of the same conversations about "why this thing and not the other thing" all the time - probably more, because there'd be more resources to compete for. :-)