Firstly apologies if my mail was read as public discussions = bad. That was not my intention. The fact I am on a vacation and writing emails on a phone with a heavily bandaged hand (which hurts when i type) surely shows I care a lot about this matter (and the fact that I am doing so on a phone might account for it being worded badly). Thanks Steven for reading it as it was intended.
The problem that I am seeing is that we have these discussions on talk pages, countless mailing lists, Bugzilla, MediaWiki pages, gerrit commit summaries ... where should decisions be recorded in such a way that they can be found? We are obviously failing...
From my perspective the decision for this change was communicated - at the
code level. See https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/108155/ and the code is the first place someone should go to understand why something is happening.
As can be seen in the commit summary there was a meeting and this was the outcome... (I was not in said meeting and your can see from the review that I demanded to understand why said change was happening in an attempt to help document this.)
Meetings imo are sometimes more effective than mailing list conversations especially for any design related work and I don't think this needs to go against the idea of an open community as long as output is recorded in some form.
In this particular situation I ask all of you how could a better job in communicating the dropping of free fonts have been done? What can we learn from this to improve our communication?
On 16 Feb 2014 19:36, "Greg Grossmeier" greg@wikimedia.org wrote:
<quote name="Brian Wolff" date="2014-02-16" time="18:00:29 -0400"> > On Feb 16, 2014 2:04 PM, "Jon Robson" <jdlrobson@gmail.com> wrote: > > > > Brad since you work for the for the foundation and seem to have a lot
of
expertise in this area and seem to have been one of the more vocal supporters of free fonts have you reached out to your work colleagues
over
video conferencing or similar to understand the problems being hit and helped them work through them? Email doesn't seem to have been an
effective
method of communication in this situation as you have pointed out.
Maybe
you can help with documenting these issues and helping people like
yourself
understand the problems and why this change was reverted?
I've seen setiment like this (discuss in person, in hangout, or
otherwise
privately) pop up recently (e.g on [1]). I think attitudes like that
are a
real problem. Supposedly we are an open community. People should be entirely prepared to explain their reasoning for doing anything on a
public
mailing list no matter if the request comes from a wmf staffer like
Brad,
or if it comes from somebody you have never heard of before. In fact i would argue that the criteria and results of evaluations should be
public
on the wiki from the get go, without anyone even asking for it.
See also: The general rule among many engineering departments at WMF is "If it didn't happen on the list (or somewhere similarly public and indexable) it didn't happen."
The team I most recently heard champion that rule was the Mobile Team.
Greg
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On 16 Feb 2014 20:01, "Steven Walling" steven.walling@gmail.com wrote:
On Sun, Feb 16, 2014 at 3:36 PM, Greg Grossmeier greg@wikimedia.org wrote:
See also: The general rule among many engineering departments at WMF is "If it didn't happen on the list (or somewhere similarly public and indexable) it didn't happen."
Wikitech is great for discussing things with a wider audience especially where we need to seek opinions of developers outside the staff. But most decisions people make are documented on a wiki, Bugzilla, and/or their preferred project management tool. A mailing list is quite bad at reaching a consensus decision on something, as evidenced by the fact that we hold RFCs on a wiki, and not here.
No one is suggesting that we should make all decisions via teleconferencing. If you read Jon's comment with good faith, he obviously wants to reach common ground with Brad on a contentious issue, and suggested using a medium that is different than what we've tried already. Brad has brought this up repeatedly on the list and Talk:Typography Refresh, discussing this with both end users who disagreed and fellow staff members. Little apparent progress has been made in reaching consensus. Jon's trying to be respectful and reach common ground with a coworker. I don't think anyone should be taken to task for such behavior, not when (as you say) Jon's clearly been part of a team that has pushed for better documentation of decisions than just in-office face to face meetings.
In short: mountain out of a mole hill. Don't assume people don't care about public discussion because they want to have a 1-1 with someone whose opinion they think is important. _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l