Talk:Technical communications

Rename
Hi. I doubt many people will notice this, but I've renamed this page to reflect the fact that the scope of this activity has shifted and widened.

The previous title ("Wikimedia Foundation engineering project documentation") made sense when the primary goal was to set up a consistent process (and underlying tools) for Wikimedia Foundation engineering staff to publish documentation about their activities. Now that we have a process, templates and even a gadget making it easier to add and edit status updates, there's not much more to do about "project documentation", besides actually publishing it.

There are still many things to improve, however, in the larger area of technical communications, like working towards an idyllic world where:
 * Development is always guided by the users' needs.
 * Users have multiple venues to learn about, and get involved in, current and upcoming software development, at different levels of detail.
 * Users are and feel heard before, during and after development.
 * Paid and volunteer developers can collaborate on features easily.
 * Probably lots of other magical things happen.

If you have thoughts on other goals we should work towards, and how to get there, please feel free to start discussions on this page. I certainly don't claim to have all the answers, on the contrary. But if I can help facilitate improvements, I'm happy to do so.

Note: I purposefully chose "technical communications", and not "engineering communications", because "engineering" tends to refer specifically to WMF employees, and I don't believe there should be a distinction between paid and volunteer developers when it comes to communicating with users.

guillom 14:42, 17 October 2012 (UTC)