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).