One question that came up during the IRC discussion that I wanted to provide more clarification for was this one from Greg:
- 20:17:06 <greg-g> In the budget section (thanks for that! it's good to have that break down), you have a line for "advocate third-party interests" at 4 hours/week. That one seems very nebulous (there is no definitive definition of what what entails, exactly, in the proposal); can you explain a bit about what you see fitting into that line item vs the first three line items in the "cost of organising (sic ;) ) a user group" section?
The “advocate third party interests” line is just a normal part of making the software available. See my response above for examples of what actually involves.
I tried to provide more detail for the other items below.
- Build up and maintain a user group
- This involves creating an entity that we can point to outside of MyM as the place for non-WMF users. Four hours a week covers the time needed for planning the work, creating the entity, and engaging people and organisations to participate and be involved in it.
- Understand and build up an ecosystem
- We need to use data from WikiApiary and performing our own surveys to conduct a full environmental scan to identify the characteristics of our users and active developers to find ways to engage them.
- Work towards a developer community
- While some of the people currently in the current MediaWiki community are third party developers (for example, the Consortium is made of of people like this), there is an entire group of developers working to extend MediaWiki that are not yet part of the MediaWiki ecosystem. This line actually means that we want to broaden the developer community to include these other developers. We need to draw these people in and show them that there is a market that needs the MW-focused skills that they have.