On Wed, Nov 6, 2013 at 7:13 AM, Brion Vibber bvibber@wikimedia.org wrote:
My brief thoughts:
- It makes sense to have a handful of folks as a core review & planning
group.
Agreed.
- However, I would consider avoiding using the term "Architect" for its
members as it's easily conflated with existing WMF job titles. I think job titles are pretty unreliable indicators at the best of times, and of course can be wildly inconsistent across companies.
This.
- I've got no particular patience for over-formal community processes like
Wikipedia adminship voting, nor interest in replicating those processes.
A million times this.
While there are plenty of problems with the traditional FOSS concept of "meritocracy", I still have great affection for the "do-it-ocracy" notion that folks who actually get stuff done should be recognized as fulfilling the roles they are performing.
People who do things are more valuable than people who only voice armchair opinions :)
As such, I'd recommend a slightly more formal role for additional "lead reviewers" or "module owners" in the code review & RFC processes; not as *gatekeepers* so much as to provide a next-step for getting something moving that's stalled -- a potential contributor or a team within WMF working on a feature should be able to easily determine who to talk to about getting a go/no-go or advice on what to do in case of a no-go.
(For comparison, I occasionally write patches for Firefox and Firefox OS; they have a *really full* bug tracker and your only hope of getting a patch reviewed is to actually request review from a particular person. A list of module owners like https://wiki.mozilla.org/Modules/FirefoxOS is a lifesaver for a casual contributor who doesn't know everybody on the Mozilla teams.)
So yeah, I think that's the idea behind the "Maintainers" page https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Developers/Maintainers. It could be more complete. And finding a way to involve these stakeholders in the RFC process could certainly be beneficial.
-Chad