You guys (and by that I mean "anybody who doesn't regularly edit a text-producing project[1], but needs to make announcements from time to time"; this includes most of the WMF employees) seem to have a problem with village pumps and instead invent all kind of alternative communication methods, like mailing lists, IRC meetings, Meta, WMF wiki etc., with the sole excuse being "they're hundreds of them".
Well, let me tell you in plain English with no regard to political correctness: your excuse sucks.
It's not an excuse. It's a problem to be solved. Let's discuss solutions, rather than laying blame.
It sucks mainly because automation was invented half a century ago - I've said this here before and I'm saying it again: it takes at the very most 2 days to write and test a script that can post a message to any number of pages. There could be thousands of projects, the effort from the poster would be the same.
Writing a bot that handles two way communication is not a simple problem. Especially when you consider that talk pages can be formatted in any way imaginable. Having an automated bot to post something is perfectly fine if we want to talk /at/ the communities, but it's not a solution if we want to talk /with/ the communities.
Also, when considering changes/features, it's important for each community to understand the needs of other communities as well. I think that's something that's completely ignored right now. Each community only cares around their own needs. Developers need to consider the needs of all of the communities, and in some cases need to balance the needs of communities against each other. It's best if all of the communities see the discussions and can be involved in a project as a whole, rather than only their portion of the discussion.
It also sucks because the vast majority of contributors don't know/don't want to use IRC, mailing list or even other wikis [2]. Those who know and want to use those alternative methods are discouraged by the scarce organization of the information.
I don't think IRC or mailing lists are a good solution to the problem either. A global discussion system is. We need to consider the current situation, though. I think the ambassadors idea is a good interim solution, even though it's a massive game of telephone that's very likely to cause miscommunication and confusion:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Tech/Ambassadors
This idea also doesn't let the communities be involved in the discussion with other communities.
Finally, it sucks because you basically expect people to look for your announcements and extract the information, when the whole idea of an announcement is to push the information from the originator to the receiver.
This is my problem with a bot that pushes a message out too. It's not two way communication. It's us sending a message out, then having no way to have a discussion.
Sumana, my understanding of the "ambassador" concept is someone that takes the information from you and puts it on their home wiki(s). That's great, except it's unlikely you will find users from all the 200+ languages and even if you do, people quit, go on vacations etc., leading to information loss. An automated English message on the pump, translated on the spot would be much better.
If we can't crowdsource this, then it's never going to happen. This is how our community scales. We have less people on the entire Wikimedia staff than we have projects (by a very large number). We can't possibly hire enough people to properly cover discussions in every single project.
- Ryan