Okay, but it seems like several employees (including you) already knew this, and several volunteers (including me) did not. This implies that there's some communications channel that employees are reading, but not volunteers. Is it some public place that we just don't visit? If so, where? Or do you have internal face-to-face meetings, private mailing lists, something like that? Assuming Wikimedia intends to maintain a bazaar development model, it's quite important that interested volunteers can be on the same page as employees.
I was tasked to make a selenium cluster for the usability initiative. It wasn't necessarily for the developer community as a whole. The usability initiative wanted its QA engineers to be able to test in a quicker fashion. The tests weren't even necessarily going to become part of a normal set of MediaWiki tests.
Now that we are thinking about integrating selenium tests into the development process, we are opening up to the community to get ideas. We aren't trying to keep anything secret. This is essentially the first step in the process. We had a brief initial discussion on this at the tech meeting.
That said, this discussion isn't fruitful. Can we please move the discussion back to planning how this is going to work?
Respectfully,
Ryan Lane