Architecture committee/2016-11-23

Present members: Brion, Daniel (chair), Gabriel, Tim, Timo. Kevin is taking notes. Faidon is visiting.

Minutes

ArchCom soon to meet Victoria (perhaps Dec 7)
Robla resigns from ArchCom in the wake of leaving WMF. Daniel is doing the chairing for now.
Ongoing activity:
- Brion: mobile video
- Gabriel: thumbnail API (Gabriel), ServiceWorkers for the discovery portal
- Tim: replacing tidy
- Timo: oldime table refactoring
- Daniel: experimenting with the Interwiki overhaul, thinking about db schema optimization
Talking with Faidon about ArchCom scope, progess, and impact. Some key points that came up:
- ArchCom should be more active in providing visions and guidelines, such as high level architecture documents.
- ArchCom should be involved in more of the ongoing development at WMF. People tend to ask ArchCom only if they have to.
- ArchCom should not only get active when asked. ArchCom scrutiny should not be limited to RFC discussions.
- For RFC discussions, we too often focus on easy-to-decide topics with limited impact.
- Lack of ops perspective in ArchCom
- A clearer scope / charter would be helpful
- Role of ArchCom needs to be discussed with our new CTO
- ArchCom has no clear connection to WMF org chart, and no power in resourcing. Platforms (mostly MediaWiki itself) are not well represented in the org chart.
Up for next week’s IRC discussion: Per-language URLs for multilingual wiki pages (T114662).