User:Adamw/Study abroad proposal

This is a proposal outlining an interdepartmental work-trade arrangement between Fundraising Tech and Research.

Proposal

A 6-month, full-time (at 32 hr/wk) commitment during which AWight is focused on ORES issues.

This could be done in coordination with the Reading department as well, if they can lend engineers for some amount of time.

The window would begin some time in January, and end in July.

Principal researcher Halfak will be AWight's project manager and technical lead.

KHorn will continue to be AWight's personnel manager.

At the end of the window, stakeholders will reevaluate where to place AWight.

Justification

• Filling a really deep hole in ORES support -- no engineering support thus far
  • Loss of a principal researcher due to engineering needs -- support would bring that back
• Adam needs a change of pace after 4.5 years of non-stop, high-stakes fundraising, and ORES is something I will be passionate about.  I loved working with Aaron and Amir on task T T106838, task T T107493, and pushing the MediaWiki extension forward this July and August, as an unpaid volunteer.  I know we will be able to accomplish beaucoup together.
• As justification for cross-departmental labor sharing in general, there is consensus that the WMF would benefit from more flexible placement, distribution, and movement of individuals.  See:
  • https://office.wikimedia.org/wiki/Embracing_skunkworks - All Hands unconference discussion about how to better support initiatives that are not being funded by the WMF. (TODO: will authors agree to make this public?)
  • http://www.allourideas.org/wmfcollab/results - The top of the list is dominated by exactly this sort of cross-departmental sentiment.

See also a similar initiative in consideration by the Community Tech department,

"Additional Community Focus for Product and Technology"

Projects

• Make ORES more robust against denial of service: Continuing from Adam's recent discussions and explorations
  • Adam to provide technical operations, including software development of infrastructure and architecture.
  • Goal: Graceful degradation response during good-faith DoS episodes.  Absorbing bad-faith DoS attacks with minimal actual DoS.
  • TODO: phab epic
    • https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T148594
    • https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T148997
    • https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T137962
    • https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T148999
    • https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T139948
    • https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T149223
    • https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T135495
• Performance improvements:
  • Current median response is 1 second -- How much faster can we get?
  • Caching aimed at live stream use-case
  • Further profiling of tokenization and other slow bits of code
  • TODO: phab epic
  • TODO: "business" motivation for optimizations
• Meta ORES: Giving users more power over ORES.  "Effective refutations"
  • Some UI.  Heavy service design.  Adds a major component beside or within ORES
  • See https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T148700
    • https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T140278

Open questions

• Will anyone else reciprocate labor to compensate fr-tech, or would that just lead to a musical chairs race?
• Will Reading be a part of the equation?

Obstacles

• Fundraising Tech budget factors into the WMF's Charity Navigator non-profit rating, specifically our fundraising efficiency, which can have major implications for major gifts donations and our reputation. It's wasteful to leave Adam on the fr-tech payroll while not doing the work, no?
• This is still an unproven way to organize labor at the WMF.
  • History of similar arrangements:
    • AWight worked on the Education Program Dashboard full-time during February 2016, after two years of occasional, unpaid volunteer engagement alongside Andrew Russell Green.
      • ramp-up and ramp-down were difficult on both ends, for both departments involved.  Hence AWight's wish to make this a 6-month commitment. TODO: link to retro notes about what I would do differently next time.
      • Work planned or performed during the February collaboration: Adam's work board + TODO show all within date range?
    • TODO: link to other colleagues' experiments--are they documented?