On Thu, Sep 1, 2016 at 11:11 AM, bawolff <bawolff+wn(a)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