MediaWiki Stakeholders' Group/Meetings/2014-10-17 Telco

Purpose

State of the tasks and communitcation structures

Time and place

17 October, 2014 at 3 PM UTC

Dial in

• Google Hangout

Whiteboard

• http://etherpad.wikimedia.org/p/Wiki-Co-Op

Attendees (for real)

• MediaWiki Cooperation Attendees

Agenda

1. Welcome
2. State of projects
   1. Recognition by AffCom
   2. Monitoring roadmap
   3. Feature wishlist (Richard Heigl)
   4. 1.24 publicity (Mark H.)
3. Survey: Who do you think is the MediaWiki Customer?
4. Mailing list -- please sign up: http://wikireleaseteam.org/listinfo/wiki-users/
5. Name of user group
6. Your items (please add your name)
7. Other
8. Closing

Minutes

Attendees

• Brian Wolf
• Siebrand Mazeland (late)
• Alexis
• Mark Hershberger
• Chris Koerner
• Cindy
• Markus Glaser
• Natasha (late)
• Richard
• Stephan
• Darren S (joining late)

State of projects

Recognition by AffCom

• Recognition process has been started
• Positive feedback
• The name must be changed
• Given this is resolved, the process is supposedly a matter of weeks

Monitoring roadmap

• How do we get the news out, e.g. that there's a RfC to drop PostgreSQL support

https://wikiapiary.com/wiki/Special:SearchByProperty/Has-20database-20type/postgres

• Markus reports on the state of this particular RfC,it has been rejected
• Richard points out this is a matter of communication
• Mark we need to find a way to survey people
• Mark support desk could be a point of entry

Feature wishlist (Richard Heigl)

• Richard and Krabina started looking for wishlists in the web and on mw.o

https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki_Cooperation/Tasks/Feature_wishlist

• There are just a few requests
• Probably they vanish in bugzilla
• Both have put some ideas on the page
• Priorisation is the next step. Again, we need to know how to survey this
• Richard wants to reach out to users he knows from WikiCon
• Chris Koerner suggests using the info on wikiapiary

1.24 publicity (Mark H.)

etherpad:p/124socialism

• We can use MW account for FB, Twitter and such to reach out
• Who has experience with these accounts?
• Probably Quims department
• Siebrand can talk about this F2F in San Francisco
• Items to "socialize" are on the etherpad
• Other way to formualte this is "Marketing 1.24"
• Mark is working with his customer to summarize the changes. This can be used for our communication
• Cindy has tested 1.24 and it works great for them
• Chris also upgrades every 3-4 months
• Both have experience with big upgrades (1.13 -1.23 rsp. 1.16. - 1.23)
• Richard suggests to work towards a "really big" release for 3rd parties.
• Markus we could target 1.27 LTS for this ambitious project
• Mark we can do this cumulative over the next releases, using our wishlist items
• Chris Speaking of big fantastic releases. I'm involved in the WordPress community. Much could be learned from their announcements of new versions An example: https://wordpress.org/news/2014/09/benny/

Survey: Who do you think is the MediaWiki Customer?

• We need to find out who are our customers, who are the people we are targeting.
• Who do you think is our target audience
  • Brian: People in organisations that collaborate, government, corporate users, especially groups running stand alone wiki where no one is solely dedicated to the wikiCertainly includes Education users
  • Chris: Everything seems to be a community decision. Elsewhere it's more centrally decided. Target is system administrators. Folks who have existing mw installs, who are not prone to mediawiki upgrades. Folks who have no experience. Communication is different with techies and usersEven sysadmin is a tough one - people who may have experience of doing stuff on certain platforms, but need a steer with MW specifics, like config tuning and which extensions are good to install (stuff like spamming prevention and user admin tasks might be common ones) - maybe imagine what a small selection of common setups are and illustrate
  • Cindy: Provide the capability to customers. Collaborative analytics. Customers are in the government. Wiki is the plumbing. True, but sometimes you just need to ask someone if you need to install that bidet or not :)
  • Mark says look at quora
  • Markus: We are talking intermediate. we need to target mediawiki professionals. people that work a lot with mediawiki. we need to enable them to provide good services to their "customers"
  • Richard head of km and qa. then IT. Internal communication - perhaps part of marketing departments too. People have a content problem in their company and mediawiki is the solution. not the best experience with consultants for spreading mediawiki. they sometimes seek other solutions to solve the problems. Maybe talking to the intermediates is a good first approach
  • Siebrand: system administrators of MediaWiki. The reason I'm so brief has to do with focus. I think that we are currently so small, and the group of sysadmins is already so large, that we should focus on that group that needs representation first. They sysadmins know what kind of features they want to offer. WMF already talks to their user bases, so that's 500M users taken care of. We should focus on the 50.000+ sysadmins that need to have a secure and functional web site.
  • Stephan: distinguising between different user groups. we should not forget the users. they should be part of our customers. It's a decision we have to make at some point
  • Natasha: I am the customer. The proof is in the pudding. the way MW is used determines a lot. Can we contact users, who make good skins. See how the change in software improves user experience
  • Alexis: Advocate for future users. Tutorials. Documentation Make it sustainable<- that's a definite start
• Mailing list -- please sign up: http://wikireleaseteam.org/listinfo/wiki-users/

Name of user group

Quote from AffCom mail "Other topic. I noticed that you read in advance our criteria on naming, unfortunately I think the name you choosed still doesn't fit to them very well. You can keep the word "cooperation" but you need to incorporate something that could avoid confusion,[1] that is, that your group is not representing the whole project MediaWiki. You can only use some words as "users" or "editors" to make explicit such idea. We can help you with more ideas if you want, please comment it with your group." Professional MediaWiki User Group

• Enable the enablers
• Does not exclude users like Natasha and Alexis
• "Professional in the sense that they have knowledge
• Siebrand: Profiessional excludes non monetary heavy users. it's too restricting"Real World Mediawiki" - those outisde the direct WM ecosystem?
• Natahsa: Non-Wikimedia
• that might be too negatice
• Collaborators
• Sysadmins

Lets discuss this on the The name will not impact the mission

Other

• Mark: is everyone comfortable with using G+?
• Cindy: what meetings are we planning to be at?
• wikimania, European Hackaton in France, US Hackathon, SMW con spring and fall
• We could have a track at one of these conferences
• Set up a Doodle to see which conference
• Natasha: WikiTranslate applied to become a charity in the UK
• Richard: not only a track, also a poster session or booth or a desk for showcases
• There's support for this idea
• Markus set up a task page for the track
• Next meeting November 7th 3pm utc
• Meeting closes at 4:16pm utc

Future Meeting Dates

Regular meetings will be held on every first Friday of the month.

User Group Meeting Dates
2016-05-06 (Friday)
2016-06-03 (Friday)
2016-07-01 (Friday)
2016-08-05 (Friday)
2016-09-02 (Friday)
2016-09-28 (during SMWCon Fall 2016 in Frankfurt)
2016-10-07 (Friday)
2016-11-04 (Friday)
2016-12-02 (Friday)

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