Engineering Community Team/March 2014 Quarterly Review

Review of the activity and plans of the Engineering Community team. For more details see our share of the Wikimedia Engineering goals, and our short term plans.

Summary
To be posted after the review on 2014-03-27.

Achievements

 * Successful debut in Google Code-in: 273 tasks resolved by 46 students supported by ~30 mentors. (trivia: Wikimedia and Apertium topped the ranking of GCI projects by tasks completed, both with 273)
 * Week by week, Tech News becomes the undisputed reference for Wikimedia technical information.
 * Ongoing: Project Management tools, Bugzilla upgrade, Architecture Summit, OPW, tech writer hiring…


 * All this with one person less and a reorganization of the team’s way of working.

Lessons learned

 * Pairing works in a team of specialized individuals working remotely.
 * Better quality, less hesitation, steady motivation.
 * Good for special tasks, less for business-as-usual.
 * Monthly ECT Showcases contribute to short term planning and team collaboration.
 * Hiring for short contracts demanding community engagement doesn’t work.

Highlights

 * Project Management tools review slower than planned, but smoother than expected.
 * Transition of Sumana to a new tech writer role, consolidates the Architecture RfC process.
 * OPW Round 7 sets a new benchmark for success in outreach programs: code merged, work deployed.
 * New tech community metrics help us discover trends plus the best and the most neglected areas. (announcement coming soon)

Team overloaded

 * Only Technical communications is on target.
 * Technical collaboration tools, Documentation, and Outreach programs have good progress, are in the good track, but carry delays and/org have to sacrifice quality and analysis due to the amount and diversity of pending work.
 * The goal of Upstream collaboration could be barely started, crowdsourced to the community (who luckily answered fast).

Areas welcoming recruitment

 * Technical collaboration tools
 * IF we select Phabricator THEN Andre needs help migrating from Bugzilla, Gerrit, etc, and tuning the new infrastructure it to our needs.
 * We still need him as Bugmeister first.
 * Outreach programs
 * Quim is in execution mode; the result is less quality in his tasks, no capacity for analysis or mid term vision.
 * We need someone focusing in events, helping in programs.

Big new shiny goals
… in addition to our goals on Google Summer of Code, FOSS Outreach Program for Women, Facebook Open Academy, and community metrics.
 * Project Management tools plan ready for execution.
 * Architecture documentation DONE (Documentation is never done, but we can leave it in a decent state, not requiring full attention.)
 * Complete list of upstream projects with contacts.

Bonus points

 * Data Hub (provisional name) master plan agreed, prototype available.
 * Plan for annual hackathons in India and the USA.

Questions

 * About the Data Hub, how far do we want to go promoting our API in 2014-15?
 * We need to match your expectations with our aspirations, and with resources available.
 * We keep wondering how the new Community Engagement team will affect us.