On Mon, Sep 5, 2016 at 11:14 PM, Quim Gil qgil@wikimedia.org wrote:
Thank you for starting this conversation, Brion!
Let me share the point where Rachel Farrand (Summit organizer) and I (Summit budget owner) find ourselves, after some conversations.
GOALS [...] The Summit and its goal have been a moving target over the years, as you can deduce from the many changes of names & goals. [0]
It has been, but given the high satisfaction scores last year, I think it behooves us to come up with iterative improvements, not a radical rethink. It seems like last year we got closer to what we've been struggling to achieve in previous years.
Widening the audience was a main goal last year. This is why we renamed it to Wikimedia (not MediaWiki) Developer Summit, and we invited developers of tools, templates, bots, mobile apps, the MediaWiki Stakeholders Group, and also non-Wikimedia users of our APIs. It was a half-backed thought that received half-backed support that unsurprisingly brought half-backed results.
I think that's a bit unfair to what we accomplished last year.
What if the Summit would be product driven, with architecture and the rest following that drive. All we are here to offer better products to our users. All the technical discussions make more sense when there is a clear product vision to be either supported or contested with reality checks.
I would like to get Wes's take on this. Last year, I didn't get the sense that Wes was eager to grab the reins on WikiDev16, and I'd be surprised if he wants to do it this year. That seems to dump too much of the responsibility on him.
It would seem that the target *participant* for this summit would be the future WMF Chief Technology Officer (CTO). Assuming that we have the CTO hired by January, it would set the bar way too high to expect that the new CTO will be responsible for running the summit. We should strive to make a big theme of this summit be "onboarding WMF's new CTO". Obviously, the scope should be more than that, but let's hope that WikiDev17 is a great introduction to the wikitech-l community for our new CTO
We have a Wikimedia Foundation Product department and also a Community Wishlist where the communities push for product improvements.
The Community Wishlist seems like a great item to highlight (again) this year.
We could set the goal of selecting (top down) a small number of product challenges and invite whoever needs to be involved to push them forward. Then we can leave plenty of free space for other topics that participants want to push (bottom up). [...] AUDIENCE [...] Product managers, UX designers, researchers, [add other roles here], and maybe even selected users/editors must be invited too in order to push the selected product improvements forward.
But there is a problem: we have a capacity limit of 200 people. The Foundation alone could basically fill the event if we don't set limits, The Summit is immediately followed by the Wikimedia Foundation AllHands annual meeting. The Summit is actually the successor of Tech Days, an AllHands for all people who worked in tech at the Foundation.
That's obviously the primary challenge we're faced with. Given that we can't invite all 5 billion or so stakeholders, we're going to have to figure out how to narrow the scope of invitations, and accomplish great things with a smaller audience.
My proposal: let's make the scope of invitations be "participants in wikitech-l". Wikitech-l has long been our "paper of record" for Wikimedia technical decision making. To the extent that causes us to ask the question "ok, what's the goal of wikitech-l?", then I think that makes this a success. We only hold WikiDev once a year, but wikitech-l is active all year long. Let's figure out why we're using this mailing list to write messages at each other.
Basically, we would need to make some tough calls to define main goals and main audiences for the Summit in 2017. Successful events (just like successful products) are often the result of tough calls, so no surprise here.
Yes. I'm looking to our Engineering Community Manager to create a great Engineering meeting.
PS1: someone asked about lessons learned --> https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Developer_Summit_2016/Lessons_Learn...
PS2: Rob suggested that a single email thread is not the best channel to solve this complex discussion and I agree with him... but I didn't want to kill this interesting thread either. Please note that the canonical places for Summit discussion are https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Talk:Wikimedia_Developer_Summit_2017 and the related Phabricator project task https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/project/board/2192/
[0] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Developer_ Summit_2017#Previous_summits
My comments at Talk:Wikimedia_Developer_Summit_2017 don't have any responses as of this writing. Clearly, I said nothing uncontroversial there :-P
Rob p.s. the rest of this thread is archived here https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2016-September/thread.html#86394. I *almost* didn't trim out Risker's very thoughtful reply, but I did. Please find it in the archive.