On Thu, Sep 1, 2016 at 11:11 AM, bawolff bawolff+wn@gmail.com wrote:
Yes, we certainly do have issues with follow-through on summit decisions.
*nod*
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).
That's a very good point! It may be good to have distinct spaces for these environments, and 'hackathon' type events tend to have a different focus on bringing people in with shorter-term projects.
I think we may want to look at ways to "boost signal" on input to and output from MWDS. Even if we don't have as much physical cross-pollination between devs and users as we could co-hosting with a bigger, less dev-focused event like Wikimania, it's important to retain that focus on user needs -- both as input to make technical decisions based on, and as output when we're reporting back what we expect to work on and if/how we can either assign resources within WMF, WMDE etc or if we need help from outside and how to organize that.
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.
Yeah, I get that. Thanks for bringing up the positive side of less-hacky. :)
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.
*nod* Some of those use-cases are great for potential Wikimedia-world uses too; we shouldn't forget those "other" users. :)
-- brion