Technical decision making

What the forum is

 * A place to empower teams to make decisions that are informed by others
 * A place to clarify stakeholders and problem statements
 * A touch point for development teams

What the forum is not

 * A decision making body (these are team leads, and managers)
 * A blocking body (we don't want these)
 * Another discussion venue for technical solutions
 * A place to do the actual stakeholder consultations on the specifics of a decision

Composition
The Technical Forum is composed of representatives from different teams from the Wikimedia Foundation, WMDE (with room to add additional affiliates) and other groups and networks from the volunteer community.

Each team or group appoints a representative in the Technical Forum and teams can change their representative at any time. Teams are expected to plan for coverage during vacations and other types of leave in the forum.

The forum has two co-chairs. One representing the Technology Department and the other representing the Product Department. Chairs are appointed by the CTO and CPO respectively and rotated on a quarterly basis.

Wikimedia Foundation Teams
Wikimedia Foundation Teams may opt to have less representation than is indicated here. For example SRE may decide to have less people represent their teams than all of the individual teams. As teams change or as we grow, updates will be made accordingly.


 * Abstract Wikipedia
 * Anti-Harassment Tools
 * Community Tech
 * Editing
 * Growth
 * Mobile Apps
 * Structured Data
 * Web
 * Product Infrastructure
 * Language
 * Inuka
 * Product Analytics
 * Parsing
 * Library
 * Analytics Engineering/Data Engineering
 * Platform Engineering
 * Architecture
 * Performance
 * Release Engineering
 * Quality and Test Engineering
 * Fundraising Tech
 * Scoring/Machine Learning Platform
 * Search Platform
 * Security
 * Research
 * Data Center Operations
 * Data Persistence
 * Infrastructure Foundations
 * Observability
 * Service Operations
 * Traffic
 * Developer Advocacy
 * Wikimedia Cloud Services

Affiliate Representation

 * WMDE Engineering

Community Representation

 * Representatives from the Independent +2s

Time Commitments
The expectation is that teams will be able to respond to forum requests for feedback within a week. The representatives should be able to confirm the level of stakeholder their team is in a decision (if at all) and provide feedback on the decision overview document if needed. This should require a maximum of two hours a week of commitment and it is suspected that many weeks will require less.

To make sure this time commitment remains at the level suggested sufficient program management support will be required to manage the process.

Administration of the Forum
Project Management will be provided from the Technology Department for administration of the forum. This role ensures that the decisions in process move along, response times are met, teams are represented and this role is responsible for running retrospective processes.