Engineering Community Team/Meetings/2013-01-29

January 29

 * Read each other's statuses and ask questions https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Platform_Engineering
 * Add status updates for the January engineering report :) https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_engineering_report/2013/January
 * FOSDEM slides draft: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/File:How_to_hack_on_Wikipedia.pdf
 * Volunteer alignment
 * Misc & travel

Current activities
Re visual editor test event: goal: get it done, and get good diversity across languages/geographies. Bug management: FOSDEM slides & icon discussion
 * Chris says: find real issues & engage with real users
 * Future activities - we'll have goals & measures for success
 * https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Bug_management/Wild_ideas#Priorities_for_Q1.2F2013
 * FOSDEM slides draft: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/File:How_to_hack_on_Wikipedia.pdf

Volunteer alignment
Discussion starting at thread "Alignment of volunteer developers (was: Re: Status and next steps for Volunteer product managers)" Some of our developers are already intimidated by the idea & process of doing code review We should talk to Chris Steipp about this in late February Next week: talk more about this and come up with next steps
 * Do we add "does this align with movement goals?" into code review guidelines? how?
 * Aligning volunteers with movement goals (often also Foundation goals) is a metagoal for ECT
 * The teams who are working on very high priority goals say they don't have the bandwidth to get more feedback & help from community
 * We ought to fix that!
 * Look in Spring 2011 https://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Product_Whitepaper -- discussing "red links" that the community is best placed to do. Can we help community work on that?
 * How up-to-date is that? Can we still work off this?
 * The two red links that aren't undergoing development are still worth thinking about.
 * Since the WMF prioritized some projects, the others might be considered "leftovers" - what about getting volunteers more involved in making yearly eng roadmap?
 * We have Krenair on Echo; we have Parsoid team interested in teaching other people how to work on Parsoid; we have Siebrand & Quim who pushed for VE testing on non-Latin character sets, along with VE team
 * The red links are big projects - we have trouble coordinating those. What if the big projects depend on these things in MW core?
 * We need to work on the little things! Decrease friction for skilled developers
 * Permissions/+2, and code review.
 * What if some patches are languishing because of alignment problems? Some patches seem like a distraction.
 * Volunteers can get more effective by learning to align themselves with project goals
 * Flow, Athena, Global Profiles ... not as accessible
 * Admin tools, Lua, & other Platform projects - RobLa promises to work with you!
 * We have made big improvements re transparency of what we are doing. But it's hard for people outside WMF to know what are upcoming open tasks on a project.
 * Example: admin tools. https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Admin_tools_development/Roadmap, but other teams use Mingle or Trello etc.
 * There could be a tradeoff of slowdown in code review if we add the responsibility of checking alignment
 * Maybe wait on that discussion till after this LevelUp round, in which more people will get code review training