User:Sumanah/TLDR Strategy

TLDR strategy meeting, 6 March 2012 Guillaume, RobLa, MarkH, ChrisM, and Sumana

Let's discuss our approach to volunteer engagement - what works and what to prioritize.

Agenda:

RobLa: what are the engineering department's big priorities

This fiscal year and probably the next as well: priorities are Editor engagement (EE) & Mobile Doing quite well on mobile, not so much on EE.

Features team focusing on that (Visual editor, etc.)

Platform's engineering role: supporting function. Keep the release process and the community engagement process from being a drag on the Features team ability to execute, and keep the community aligned with the foundation's goals

• Sumana: how we can work to achieve them

As we're looking at what we do and not do, we should look at them through the lens of the movement priorities, and maybe drop things that aren't helping us with them.

Rob: « Stop standing over the tree and yelling "Grow!" »

There are many commonalities between MW as enterprisey & MW for Wikimedia.

being aware of what all the volunteers are working on is good in and of itself.

(Offtopic question: what about collaborating with other wiki platforms? Not very helpful because architectures are so different, not much technical collaboration possible. RobLa: collaboration & codesharing with other big PHP web apps might be better, but there is enough difference in coding style, etc. that it's a hard, unnatural fit.)

Collaboration is increasing with Wikia & other companies that use MediaWiki.

• Where are there holes in the funnel?

Sumana making a chart of "Tech activities that volunteers can do"

Goal of the taxonomy: talk about how people can get from "I don't know anything about this except that it sounds interesting" to "I've become an integral part of this community for this activity"

• How should we prioritize work in the 2012-2013 fiscal year?

We're doing budget process now. So where do we need staff?

Priorities -- we may be too event-focused. Event treadmill. Maybe we should hire an event manager as explicit position.

• What big ideas should we take on, and what chores aren't paying off?

Sumana: reduce events & GSoC Guillaume: Danese once intended to use GSoC as a stopgap measure, until we were able to organize our own student program, better meeting our own needs. Maybe an idea to revisit? RobLa & Chris: get local (SF) people to go to PHP user groups! And get people in the dev community all around the world to do so!

What isn't as effective as it should be? Guillaume: reporting. RobLa: let's come up with processes that have ancillary benefits, and that naturally piggyback on other existing, working processes. Guillaume: Getting people out of private email & face-to-face conversations ...

and communicating about what we do. We are ridiculously low in our quantity of communications about engineering.

• What works? how to tweak it so it scales?
• fold into Jay's project: expanding blog into more news, more of a media outlet!

Sumana/RobLa: Let's focus more on Wikia!

Bugmeister should do better on interfacing with other project teams! Managing software development... 20% time....

What do we do that we don't get much out of?

General:

• What conference outreach tactics help us get and grow volunteers?
• Should we shift some responsibilities from some team members to others?

(end at 4pm)