User talk:BDavis (WMF)/Projects/Tool Labs support

Toby has given me approval to join the Community Tech team and work on this project as my major focus. I've had a great time working with Brad and Gergő, but I'm excited for this chance to stretch myself and work with the large community of Tool Labs developers as well as the Community Tech and Wikimedia Labs teams. I expect to begin this project in April 2016.

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Woot! This is going to be great.  :)

There was a tool labs user survey done a few months ago...I think it would be a good idea to see what feedback came out of that.

Absolutely. I have the results of that survey and although I have not done a detailed and public analysis yet a strong theme that came out of the initial review was that documentation should be better. While getting some "easy" things going to improve documentation organization I want to also spend more time with the survey data and get that analysis published to drive further discussion.

I've got compiled data from the survey now. Just waiting on review from some folks before publishing it to meta or wikitech.

I found these pages while wandering around Category:Drafts

• User:Kmenger/Tool_Labs
• User:Kmenger/ToolLabsSprint

https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/toolserver-l/2012-May/004967.html

This madness has to stop. Wikis should stop depending on services that are not hosted in multi-maintainer projects!

See also: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Toolserver/Stable_server/Candidates

and https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/toolserver-l/2009-June/002137.html

https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/toolserver-l/2014-August/006592.html

Nemo bis rescued them. https://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=Special%3APrefixIndex&prefix=Toolserver%3A&namespace=0

Related? T115650 - Create an authoritative and well promoted catalog of Wikimedia tools.

That does certainly seem to be related to my goal of making the tools landing page better (and reminds me that https://tools.wmflabs.org/hay/directory/ may be most of what I was thinking about already). I think I tend to agree with some comments on that task that "authoritative" may be a stretch.

From the Developer Relations point of view, it would be very useful to find a way to identify top contributors of Labs. What makes you a top contributor in Labs is to be defined. The problems to solve are similar to the problem of knowing what are the most remarkable tools in Labs: either you are an insider and know by heart, or you need to contact everybody and see who responds.

Knowing who are the top contributors would allow us to help them better inviting them to Tech Talks, events, meetings to gather quality feedback...

I'm not sure I'm excited about the idea of a "top contributors" list that somehow tries to rank people against each other, but I think I understand your motivation.

I would certainly like to find ways to help developers in the Tool Labs community connect with each other. When we have good channels of communication it should be easier to notify the entire community of events and opportunities to interact with the WMF and other groups.

Something that might be related that I've been thinking abstractly about is a mentoring list on wikitech somewhere that could be used to self-identify as willing and capable of providing assistance with various Tool Labs relates technologies (mysql, grid engine, programming language X, framework Y, ...)