<quote name="C. Scott Ananian" date="2016-09-23"
time="16:10:37 -0400">
The suggestion has been raised (
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Topic:Tbyqbjcuihhkhtk8) that one of the
Topics for the upcoming Developer Summit be the Community Wishlist.
It seems to me that the community wishlist is still not completely embraced
by engineering/devs, perhaps partly because some of the items are
impossible, or already on a roadmap, or others have priorities which are
out of sync with implementation difficulty. It is excellent work by the
Community Tech team that somehow still feels "not completely integrated".
I'm curious what "completely embraced by engineering" would be? Isn't
it
enough to have a full team structure with management (both engineering
and product) to be considered embraced? Do we need to do a group hug? ;)
Also, why does it need to be completely embraced by all devs? I know
many more fully staff projects that are even less embraced (by the
development community as a whole).
Also, what is "completely integrated" mean in this context? I don't see
the tools that they are developing as being oddly non-integrated within
the workflows they are working with.
tl;dr: I'm trying to figure out why those concerns should demote it?
Perhaps one way to structure a "wishlist"
topic at the dev summit would be
to collaborate to improve the 'status' category of
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/2015_Community_Wishlist_Survey/Results. It
would be helpful to have an engineering assessment for each wishlist item
detailing either:
(a) this is being actively worked on now by WMF staff
(b) this is on a roadmap for (roughly) XYZ date (with a link to the
roadmap),
(c) this depends on some other prior work (which is on a roadmap)
(d) this is technically sound but not a priority of the WMF (for
<reasons>, spelled out) so we are eager for community assistance
(e) there is serious disagreement about how to best accomplish this,
technically
(f) there is serious disagreement about how to best accomplish this,
non-technically (UX, social factors, mission creep, ongoing maintenance,
community A disagrees with community B, etc)
(g) this is, in the judgement of engineering, impossible or unwise.
It seems that this has been done for the top ten wishlist items, but we
could collaborate on filling out details on more of the items.
Would that need to be a DevSummit session? Or a pre-Summit call to
action/project?
A follow up session could concentrate on items in
categories (d) and (e),
attempting to resolve roadblocks. Category (f) would need non-engineering
participation, perhaps at the next Wikimania.
This sounds like a reasonable use of time at the DevSummit. Most of
those 'non-technically' aspects are in-fact represented at the DevSummit
(UX, maintenance concerns, mission creep), and the others that aren't
decided represented there would, based on past experience, still benefit
from a conversation with the DevSummit group (social factors, community
disagreement).
Greg
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