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Engineering Community Team/Meetings/2014-01-07

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2014-01-07

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Last quarter review

  • Overall good. We accomplished what we wanted to accomplish.
  • We had one person less, but we were good at fine-tuning the plans regularly, and being in sync

January plans

  • Quim has currently too much on the plate. Can't take much work related to Architecture Summit. Welcoming help with "The Wikipedia Stack" session for FOSDEM.
  • Sumana will work on better software architecture documentation in relation with the Summit, starting with Requests_for_comment/Process, as proposed by Rob: "Some of the reasons the documentation is so sparse is because we have a larger issue of process to sort out, but the right first step would be to try to write up something that is as complete as, say, Python's PEP process or PHP's RFC process, and collecting the list of questions that exercise produces so that we can have a larger conversation about what we want to do there."
  • Sumana will also take the preparation of "The Wikipedia Stack".
  • Sumana is also interested in verifying the data provided by Metrics Grimoire at http://korma.wmflabs.org/ , but this might be a side project.

Other questions

  • Sumana: the training at hacker School and the fact of contributing to several projects has been very useful to see how unfriendly our community can be to newcomers, compared with other projects. Our complexity can be comparable to the Linux Kernel, with so many components and dependencies. Gerrit is utterly unfriendly for newcomers compared to GitHub. We need to highlight simple tasks and processes that newcomers can complete without needing all the background.
    • Quim: true. This was one of the reasons to apply for Google Code-in, and now we are in a better position to offer those isolated tasks, easy to complete. Still, there is a lot of work to be done.
  • "Architect" title discussion -- trailed off? outcome?
    • Quim: It was agreed that Wikimedia Foundation job titles shouldn't be mixed with technical community roles. WMF HR and community meritocracy are different things. Still, nobody contested the current role of "architects" of Tim, Brion, and Mark.
  • MassMessage & ​​related "who signs off on big new features" thing - what was the outcome?
    • different views on review and agreement process
    • Quim: ... unclear outcome. My personal interpretation is that WMF teams can lead in the observance of quality criteria for new big features coming from other community members, but they are not the gatekeepers. "The community" is who decides. Still, that discussion didn't end with e.g. a documented release process for these features. In my opinion the risk of having another clash in the future for the same reasons still exists.
  • what do we want to happen during Architecture Summit?
    • ECT is helping but we don't have any goal as a team other than a successful event.
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