Wikimedia Technical Conference/2018/Session notes/Process and Action
Corey:
- [Slides and presentation]
- Why are we here, and how can we make it a successful conference
- In general, we provide the tools to multiply the impact of other people
- People have various frustrations with the status quo
- We want to move faster despite the difficulty of change - Everything can potentially be done, but only some things are feasible
- We've been working separately so much, which causes frustrations. We’ve worked to make sure as many stakeholder perspectives as possible are represented here
- Hence, Platform CDP, and this conference.
- [Q. to audience] What is our platform?
- [Daniel K.] Something that others build on
- [Brion] Our platform is people
- [many] MediaWiki!
- Yes, it could be defined as:
- [slide showing perspective options]
- Besides MediaWiki and associated extensions and services, there are largely separate platforms for things like analytics, fundraising, content scoring, and search
- Onwiki contributors tend to see the top-layer of technical aspects. The bots, the templates, the gadgets.
- Content and Community
- Everyone has a different definition, but this is one way of conceptualizing the platform
- Slide showing overlapping venn diagram of platforms and audiences, and how much is shared
- How should we evolve?
- [discussing Focus areas slide] note that we haven’t even gotten to tech yet by the third bullet. There are many human problems to investigate and solve. We created this list by talking to you.
- [Slide showing how Platform Evolution Program evolved from previous similar attempts] The first thing we realized we had to do is talk to as many stakeholders as possible.
- [Slide illustrating topic clustering that reduces to the five focus areas]
- While we want people to explore and build new and unexpected things, we also need a map and a destination so that we’re working in the same direction.
- The goal of all of this is to arrive at a 3-5 year technical roadmap.
- We’re not going to arrive at a roadmap here, but we are practicing collaborative roadmapping skills
- Don’t clump: we have a lot of people here with a wide range of expertise, who probably have the answers to your questions. Meet them!
- Help leaders make decisions, by clearly detailing the pros/cons for each option. It’s easy to assume that leadership has ground-level knowledge that they actually don’t
- "No buts" - don't second guess your ideas, or shoot down other ideas too quickly. We need to know about challenges, but many can be resolved.