Topic on Talk:Wikimedia Developer Summit/2017/Topic ideas

This is the text of the "Collaboration" section of WikiDev17/Topic ideas as of this writing

• Improving technical collaboration. There are many angles to look at, all of them needing improvements: between developers (professional-professional, professional-volunteer developers, Wikimedia - MediaWiki 3rd parties), and between developers and users (developers-Wikimedia communities, developers-readers). The code review discussion, the Technical Collaboration Guideline, and the efforts to learn from existing and new readers would fit here.

• Functioning code review process, because it affects our ability to ship better software faster, and our ability to recruit volunteer contributors to these efforts.
• A plan for discussion pages in MediaWiki, because it is a key aspect of user collaboration and we are far from meeting all user expectations.
• Real-time collaborative editing. Often discussed, rarely planned at a long-term level
• Consolidate work on MediaWiki core
• (A unified vision for) Collaboration
  • Real-time collaboration (not just editing, but chatting, curation, patrolling)
  • WikiProject enhancements: User groups, finding people to work with, making these first class DB concepts
  • Civility/diversity/inclusiveness, mechanisms to handle/prevent harassment, vandalism, trolling while working together
  • Real-time reading -- watching edits occur in real time
  • Integration with WikiEdu
  • Broadening notion of "an edit" in DB -- multiple contributors, possibly multiple levels of granularity
  • Tip-toeing toward "draft"/"merge" models of editing
  • Better diff tools: refreshed non-wikitext UX, timelines, authorship maps, etc.

I see 3 main topics on that:

• Technical collaboration improvement (first point), which is on TC scope, with TCG and the to be hired developer advocate
• MediaWiki core
• Real-time things & collaboration

That last point has a common blocking point: discussions. I would recommend to focus on discussions as a brick for future products.

I agree with @Trizek (WMF) and CScott that there are too very different topics under this "Collaboration" umbrella. We should at least separate

• editorial collaboration to improve content

• technical collaboration to improve software

If we want to keep both as main topics, we should find separate statements for each. For instance:

• A unified vision for editorial collaboration
• How to engage new technical contributors

The MediaWiki core part looks like a topic in itself, more related with "MediaWiki core" than "collaboration".

@Qgil-WMF and I had a conversation about this topic earlier this morning. The piece that I'm most interested in is the technical collaboration piece, but I don't object to the editorial collaboration piece. Here's links to the two areas:

• Editorial collaboration
  • Wikimedia Developer Summit/2017/A unified vision for editorial collaboration
• Technical collaboration
  • Wikimedia_Developer_Summit/2017/How to grow our technical community

I'm glad that the new name for "technical collaboration" ditched the qualifier "new", since I think that biases us to ignore the challenges of collaboration among experienced developers. I like the emphasis on growth as a goal. We should strive to create an environment that people want to be part of, which is going to involve some mix of celebrating who we are now (including the quirky bits), while simultaneously figuring how to improve our collaboration (e.g. how to make it more welcoming for those that aren't here yet to join the fun)