Wikimedia Discovery/Checkin meeting minutes/2015-07-27

Welcome

Wikimania debrief
- Great Discovery presentation. Good participation from audience. Possibly not recorded.
- Maps is running on production. The tile service seems to be eagerly anticipated.
- Dan met a guy in charge of the wikimedia portal, who is in the SF Bay area, so we will follow up later.
- A lot of positive responses to our team. External visibility.
Dan will present a follow-up at the end of August
Moiz talked with analytics folks; we should look into doing “trending articles”
“Scalable Event System” planning has begun
- Oliver will be there to represent Discovery, but others are welcome to participate as well
Franz from AltaVista (Oliver will talk about this)
- Professor interested in doing research around our search engine. Oliver handling initial discussions, then will bring in Dan/Tomasz/Wes/whoever.
Wes heard from DuckDuckGo; will send a summary. They are interested in infoboxes.
Trey did research; found that some of our zero results are legitimate due to weird input.
Front end hiring: Interviewing 3 candidates this week.

Need a new volunteer (which is Stas - at least for now, we may do quarterly rotation afterwards)
Are we blocked?
- No
Are we blocking? https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/tag/blocked-on-search/
- Not really SoS blockers, but cross-departmental dependencies
  - Ops Q1 goal multi-datacenter (we will assist upon request)
- Not really SoS blockers, but cases where Discovery members are needed by other projects:
  - Charts security issue (Yuri, following up on pre-reorg obligations)
  - Wikipedia zero (Yuri is still assigned there part-time)
  - Transparency report (Moiz, following up on pre-reorg obligations)
Anything from SoS that we should be aware of?
- https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T106388 (External Store audit)