A good way of avoiding clashes would be to publish the technical roadmap showing where WMF expects to be taking its technical development over the next five years or so, for the community to discuss and comment on I have yet to hear any reason why this can not or should not be done.
"Rogol"
On Wed, Mar 15, 2017 at 1:48 AM, Pine W wiki.pine@gmail.com wrote:
Quim,
Thanks for the comments.
A brief note about the goal of "there are no clashes between product development teams and communities". That is an ambitious goal around here, partly because there are changes planned and happening concurrently in so many places that I think it would be a challenge to surface all potential conflicts early and make them visible to relevant community members. (As an example, a change that might be received favorably on Wiki A might generate a commotion on Wiki B because it broke an existing tool, made an existing workflow take longer, or conflicts with their community's priorities. A current example of this kind of situation is with Flow, which the last I heard is viewed favorably on Catalan Wikipedia and unfavorably on English Wikipedia). I'm not sure that clashes can be 100% prevented, but I'm thinking that once the Newsletter extension is working, that might be a useful way of informing more interested people in a more timely fashion about planned changes, and encouraging people to enroll as beta testers and translators, so that there are fewer surprises.
I think that what might be a more readily solvable problem would be a standardized way of resolving clashes between product teams and communities so that, when such clashes almost inevitably happen at some point, resolution comes sooner rather than later and hopefully in a way that is mutually acceptable. Perhaps that could be discussed in the Technical Collaboration Guidance document.
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