Talk:Audiences Technology Working Group/Problem Identification

I'm not sure I agree with the currently stated goal. Or better - I think it tries to address our long term needs:

- For platform/infrastructure teams to understand the priorities and technical needs of Audiences in the mid-to-long term, so that they're able to drive the infrastructural changes needed to fullfill those needs.

- For Audiences teams to be able to acknowledge the technical debt that needs to be addressed in their products, and consider it in their mid-to-long term planning.

there are processes in place for this, and if they don't work, they need fixing for sure.

All this being said, I feel that there is a need for such a venue to gather and reach a consensus now because there is a profound disarray between people (not necessarily evenly divided across Audiences and Technology) on what technological direction we want to pursue. This is a direct consequence of the absence of any sort of technical coordination that lasted about 2 years (that's how long we've been without a CTO or a VP of engineering), and so now we find ourselves in a situation where some people push for an extreme microservicization of our infrastructure, and others think the realm of services outside of MediaWiki should be limited .

We have also the problem that our current services infrastructure has grown inorganically, with some infrastructural choices that were carried through irregardless of consensus, that now are assumed as a "given good", while that might not be the case.

Another goal this group should have is to define how much the Wikimedia Foundation is committed to the development of MediaWiki as a Free Software platform, and which features of the wikimedia sites we're ok with not having in MediaWiki.

What I'd like to get from this Working Group is:

- A clear-cut position on what we consider part of the "third-party wiki user" product (that is - MediaWiki), and what (if anything) we consider of wikimedia-only interest.

- A small, clear, shared set of criteria for what should live in a microservice and what should be part of MediaWiki

- A shared understanding of the deficiencies of the current infrastructure, and of the steps we want to take to fix it

I think this should be in some form the immediate goal of this working group.

From my interpretation of the Working Group Proposal, I think the items you listed under "What I would like to get from this Working group" are in line with the goals…

The only difference is that instead of writing out those specific goals, the idea was to have everyone do what you just did: Write out the problems as they affecting YOU from YOUR view point.… and after we can review them together a try to relate them to one another.

So my reading is that what you want to accomplish isn't that far off, but maybe it could be written out better. Having read this, do you think the same or am I still missing something?

Or perhaps you can suggest something to add to the Problem Identification process that will help address the shortcomings you identified? Or is there something we can add to the goals to make sure your needs are addressed?