Wikimedia Discovery/Checkin meeting minutes/2015-07-27

Welcome

 * Welcome to Mikhail, our new Data Analyst (who loves machine learning)

Topics from last week (which might not need attention)

 * James (and Nik) last day July 24

Announcements, Information, Questions

 * Wikimania debrief
 * Great Discovery presentation. Good participation from audience. Possibly not recorded.
 * Maps is running on production. The tile service seems to be eagerly anticipated.
 * Dan met a guy in charge of the wikimedia portal, who is in the SF Bay area, so we will follow up later.
 * A lot of positive responses to our team. External visibility.
 * Dan will present a follow-up at the end of August
 * Moiz talked with analytics folks; we should look into doing “trending articles”
 * “Scalable Event System” planning has begun
 * Oliver will be there to represent Discovery, but others are welcome to participate as well
 * Franz from AltaVista (Oliver will talk about this)
 * Professor interested in doing research around our search engine. Oliver handling initial discussions, then will bring in Dan/Tomasz/Wes/whoever.
 * Wes heard from DuckDuckGo; will send a summary. They are interested in infoboxes.
 * Trey did research; found that some of our zero results are legitimate due to weird input.
 * Front end hiring: Interviewing 3 candidates this week.

Scrum of Scrums

 * Need a new volunteer (which is Stas - at least for now, we may do quarterly rotation afterwards)
 * Are we blocked?
 * No
 * Are we blocking? https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/tag/blocked-on-search/
 * Not really SoS blockers, but cross-departmental dependencies
 * Ops Q1 goal multi-datacenter (we will assist upon request)
 * Not really SoS blockers, but cases where Discovery members are needed by other projects:
 * Charts security issue (Yuri, following up on pre-reorg obligations)
 * Wikipedia zero (Yuri is still assigned there part-time)
 * Transparency report (Moiz, following up on pre-reorg obligations)
 * Anything from SoS that we should be aware of?
 * https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T106388 (External Store audit)

FYI

 * (None)