Re: [Wikitech-l] WikiDev17 Collaboration topic (Re: Opening up MediaWiki dev summit in January?)

I edited the topic on wiki ( https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/WikiDev17/Topic_ideas#Collaboration) a little bit, to separate out the "Technical Collaboration" and "Editor Collaboration" pieces a bit. Both are interesting, although I feel like the target audiences would diverge greatly. It would be most interesting to explore how those subtopics could be profitably combined -- why not dogfood our own tools to do code review with the same mechanisms we use to review wikitext diffs? -- but I admit that may well be a step too far. Perhaps simple juxtaposition at the summit will accomplish the desired cross-fertilization. It is perhaps unfortunate that we have an existing team named "Collaboration". It creates a whiff of toe-stepping and cookie-licking danger to have a topic eponymous with an existing team. The page you cite ( https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Collaboration) is actually quite useful in distinguishing the broad idea of "collaboration" from the actual remit (and great work!) of the currently-constituted team. Part of why I suggested this summit topic was that I felt that a proper response to its challenge would of necessity be *cross team* and *whole org*. I think our individual parsing, editing, reading, collaboration, etc teams do a reasonable job setting their own goals. But what is missing is the sort of discussion and decision-making that can occur at a broad summit, where we reconcile (for example): * improvements to discussion pages (collaboration team) * real-time collaborative editing (editing team) * the introduction of "user groups" backing WikiProjects to the core DB (mythical "core team") * broading the notion of "a revision" in core DB (mythical "core team") * real-time reading (reading team) * social factors in UX to preserve and strengthen and diversify our community and stop harassment (community engagement, design teams) * existing workflow mechanisms and projects (collaboration team, mythical wikiedu team) * better diff tools (collaboration team + editing team) * draft namespace/merge tools (i don't think anyone owns this) So perhaps naming the topic "Collaboration" is as much a mistake as it would be to name a topic "Editing", "Discovery", "Reading", etc.---although I don't have another name to propose---since the goal for a summit topic should be to identify opportunities to solve problems which have proven difficult to resolve with only smaller-scale collaboration inside our existing team structures. To identify fixed points of consensus upon which we can, Atlas-like, shift the entire organization. :) --scott On Wed, Sep 21, 2016 at 1:53 AM, Rob Lanphier <robla(a)wikimedia.org> wrote: -- (http://cscott.net)