Jonathan Morgan wrote:
On Tue, May 19, 2015 at 6:52 AM, MZMcBride
<z(a)mzmcbride.com> wrote:
What is "Community Tech"? How does it
differ from the work the rest of
the engineering and product team is doing? Are there people working for
the Wikimedia Foundation who are doing design and development that is
not for the Wikimedia community? That would be pretty worrying.
Really? It's worrying that the Wikimedia Foundation would devote design
and development resources towards projects that don't directly benefit
5+/month editors?* Like, for example, readers?
*"active Wikimedia editors" mentioned on the meta page
It's darkly amusing that you would translate "Wikimedia community" to mean
users with some arbitrary number of edits per month.
Yes, you are misunderstanding. I'm sorry the team
fails to impress you.
The community tech team is a product of the recent Engineering
reorganization, and I assume our colleagues will make an announcement
once the team is fully assembled. In the meantime, they're eliciting
ideas. What exactly is so insulting about a new team, still in the
process of being formed, eliciting ideas for projects to work on?
Maybe you can explain how this new effort is different from the thousands
of Phabricator Maniphest tasks at
<https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/maniphest/> and pages such as
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/CEP/Process_ideas> and
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wish_list>? Is there really some shortage
of ideas of what to work on? Can you perhaps see how it might seem a
little rude to show up with a "Community Tech" team and start asking "hey,
yeah, so, uh, got any ideas for what we should be doing"? Are the other
technical teams really engaged in projects not focused on serving the
Wikimedia community? Are we creating teams that have no clear objectives?
Didn't we just do this exercise in 2014 and we actively do some version of
it on a daily basis in Phabricator?
I don't believe you're truly sorry that the team fails to impress me. I
think you actually agree with me about the virtue of having these small
teams with vague, yet potentially massive, scopes such as Community Tech
and Multimedia. I think experience tells us it's very difficult for them
to be effective and beneficial, but... this isn't a very technical topic,
so I suppose we should move this discussion elsewhere. :-)
MZMcBride