On 16/01/15 15:04, Rob Lanphier wrote:
Still, the uncomfortable shrugging continues. The
group is broader,
but still lacks the breadth, particularly in front end and in the
development of newer services such as Parsoid and RESTBase.
It appears that we won't be able to keep the members we have, let
alone broaden our membership. Mark has said that it's not worth his
time, Brion hasn't attended a committee meeting since November, Daniel
has given hints that his involvment might not continue, and Roan has
been deeply skeptical from the outset. I think I am the only one who
is committed to it, and that is out of a sense of duty rather than
rational reflection.
The problem is that the work is mostly administrative and not
empowered. Committee members are skeptical of many of the current
ideas floating around at the moment, and have their own ideas about
what things should be priorities, but have no expectation that those
ideas will be considered for resourcing.
We review the technical details of design proposals, but I think most
committee members do not find that to be engaging. We've all reviewed
things before, and will presumably continue to do so regardless of
whether we are on a committee. We could veto technical details as
individuals, so what is the committee for?
I believe no one would dispute the credentials
of every member of the group. Brion, Tim, and Mark have an extremely
long history with the project, being employees #1, #2, and #3 of the
WMF respectively, and all having contributed massively to the success
of Wikipedia and to MediaWiki as general purpose wiki software. In
most open source projects, one of them would probably be BFDL[5].
Roan and Daniel are more "recent", but only in relative terms, and
also have very significant contributions to their name.
It's not a community open source project, it is an engineering
organisation with a strict hierarchy. We don't have a BDFL, we have a VPE.
On the leadership front, let me throw out a
hypothetical: should we
have MediaWiki 2.0, where we start with an empty repository and build
up? If so, who makes that decision? If not, what is our alternative
vision? Who is going to define it? Is what we have good enough?
Sorry to labour the point, but the way to go about this at present is
pretty straightforward, and it doesn't involve the architecture
committee. You just convince the management (Damon, Erik, etc.) that
it is a good thing to do, get yourself appointed head of the
"MediaWiki 2.0" team, hire a bunch of people who agree with your
outlook, get existing engineers transferred to your team. It's not
even hypothetical, we've seen this pattern in practice.
-- Tim Starling