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Wikimedia Developer Summit/2018/Keynote by Toby Negrin

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Keynote by Toby Negrin

DevSummit event

[edit]
  • Day & Time: Monday, 4:40 pm – 5:20 pm
  • Room: Tamalpis Room
  • Notetaker(s): quiddity, 'batman',
  • Slides: [COMING SOON]

Session Notes:

  • The Three Questions
  • What is the product of the WMF?
    • There are at least 3 products.
      • Content: the wiki projects. Reader-focused, donor-focused, and extends into other spaces like policy and partnerships. [?]
      • Community: without the community, there'd be no content. We spend a lot of time talking to the community. [?]
      • Platform: Wikipedia is just one of the many wikis that use MediaWiki, and we should support them all, including fostering the technical community, [?]
    • We need to find where all the places overlap
  • How do we decide what we build?
    • [?]
  • How do we make decisions?
  • Agenda: Current status of Audiences team
  • Questions we need to answer to get to a shared [?]
  • Strategic Plan: use annual planning as the venue for a unified plan
  • What does that entail? All-dept strategic process underway [?]
  • [more slides]
  • questions:
  • Matanya: where does feature development fit into the Executive plan?
    • Toby: [?]
  • Matanya: User-retention wasn't mentioned as a goal, but is in the objective
    • Toby: Yeah, that will appear as another goal, probably with the title "user retention"
  • Aaron: consensus based, but community consultation happens at end. Can you elaborate on how grassroots feedback gets into the annual plan.
    • Toby: Good question, we publish the annual plan every year, and don't get a ton of feedback. There's definitely an oppourtunity to do a better job there.
    • Victoria: We're here to discuss the prioritization and input, [?], and this bottom-up wisdom is part of today and of the past few months from collecting ideas for this event.
    • Toby: You can see some of the research in the New Readers project. Korean and Czech gave good input.
  • Leila: At the beginning, you showed the 3 different products, and listed Community - but that's not really a product. I can see them as an asset?
    • Toby: Yeah, that's not what I meant to imply. The community is really important.
      • Leila: Right, just the 3 items were very different types
  • Birgit: +1 to Leila. I'd prefer talking about what is the unique selling point of the Wikimedia movement. Sharing knowledge and tools. We support the communities to grow, but we cannot shape it like we do a product.
    • Toby: If we replace "Community" with "collaboration" that would perhaps be clearer.
  • C Scott: When you defined the community it didn't seem to include 3rd party users. I'd suggest adding that into the strawdog.
    • Toby: That's one of the decisions that, one of the user-communities that we really need to reach. It has caused a lot of problems with the technical directions that we have to make.
      • C Scott: influence on [?]. Regular problems with identifying problems and then not being able to come up with resources to get it done.
        • Toby: It's interesting how these community processes do not fit into our annual planning. It's tractable to take the lists of requests from the dev summit and feed them into annual planning.
  • TheDJ: in that 3rd part support session we also had ideas about why it was good to do it, and opportunities that are beneficial to the Foundation. We need to summarize that, and collectively make some space to actually do something with it. If we have these business cases but itheyre not being presented .... We need to combine [?]
  • TheDJ: The lessons we learned with the Community Wishlist project. We do too many products where feedback comes afterwards. Which is logical, but we seem to be bad at actually doing something with it. Perhaps we need a working group that takes the information that feeds that feedback into the development process.
    • Toby: We have tried that in the past, and got much better with the Edit Review project, and extended that project a bit.
  • TheDJ: Now you've taken the feedback, how do you apply that to the *next* project/product. Where do we collect it, how do we collate it?
    • Toby:
  • Birgit: In WMDE we have very diverse and multiple feedbacks loops during the feature development, and proceed in very small steps with many feedback loops.
    • Toby: Word.
  • Moriel: Challenge is, we consider a project that is launched as "done", but that's actually the beginning of the project. We have a lot of things we want and need to build. We're really bad at sunsetting things. That needs space in the 4-5 year plan. Some teams have dozens of extensions that we're supposed to be maintaining. That needs to be better represented in all our plans.
  • Jan D: WMDE worked on a framework around [?]. How do we create products with the community. Perhaps connected to sunsetting. How do we deal with tough decisions in relation to the community. Often turns into an anti-pattern. [???]
  • Matt F: We need to listen to our community (dev and editors and staff), but that's not the same as "we should do what they tell us to do". Our vision/mission involve bringing in new people, and they're not involved yet.
  • Matt F: The people at our conferences/meetups are not necessarily representative of our community, especially in very small/focused events like this.
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