Yes, I think we *should* provide a focus for the event, and that the focus
should be on users, use cases, and what we as developers need to do to
achieve those things.
In my opinion we haven't had a strong focus to the event in the past, and
it's limited what we accomplish there to largely making a set of technical
presentations and having a few discussions that either don't produce a
decision or don't have much affect on what actually happens after the
summit.
(I'd be very interested also in some feedback on things that *have* worked
well at MWDS in the past, as I'd love to encourage anything that has been
productive! But I think we've not been successful in an architectural focus
so far.)
-- brion
[Sorry about last email. accidentally hit send]
Yes, we certainly do have issues with follow-through on summit decisions.
For me personally, I've found the dev summits mostly useful as a
community building type thing (For the MediaWiki developer community).
As a remotee (Or at other various points in time, as a volunteer), its
rare I actually see everyone in real life. The dev summit provides a
venue to actually interact with everyone. While it may not actually be
the best at resolving architectural issues, I feel like it helps me
understand where everyone is coming from.
In particular, I find that the dev summit is more effective for this
purpose than hackathons, as the unstructured nature of hackathons tend
to get people clumping in groups that already know each other. The dev
summit on the other hand better provides for cross-pollination of
ideas in my experience. (Don't get me wrong, I love hackathons too,
just for different reasons).
However, use-cases and users is why we're here, so I'm certainly not
opposed to that focus. I just hope we continue to retain this as an
event that's more talky and less hacky, as I feel that's where a lot
of the uniqueness of the event came from.
One aspect of the first MediaWiki architecture summit that I really
liked but has been mostly lost, was inviting non-Wikimedia mediawiki
users. They're a group that has use-cases that we don't often hear
about, and provide a unique perspectives. Although I suppose its not
surprising that their involvement has kind of been lost. I would love
to see them come back, although I'm not exactly holding my breath for
that.
--
Brian