Talk:Technical communications/Fall 2012 consultation

Out of scope ideas
Bugzilla-specific suggestions:
 * Try to find a way to do more with 'assigned'. (unassign automatically)


 * Could you elaborate? Does this refer to cookie licking? What would be potential criteria to "unassign automatically"? --Malyacko (talk) 20:44, 5 December 2012 (UTC)


 * For WMF issues, perhaps add a state 'scheduled' + date


 * My current take on this (not perfect but a first step) is that this should be done together with setting up a bot that pastes information from Gerrit automatically into Bugzilla. For example, if the Gerrit commit message of a merged code change matches a regex thar defines a bug number like ((b)[ug]{0,2}\s * [id]{0,3}|id|fix|pr|#)[\s#=] * \[?([0-9]{1,6})\]? then there should be an automatic notification in Bugzilla saying "Gerrit change ID 12345 has been merged and mentions this bug report. It can take up to two weeks until the code change is available on one of the Mediawiki wiki sites, depending on the deployment schedule at https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki_1.21/Roadmap ." --Malyacko (talk) 20:44, 5 December 2012 (UTC)


 * Make a stricter separation between WMF and non-WMF items in bugzilla.


 * What are "items" in this context? The "Wikimedia" product vs. the rest? Bugzilla "Target Milestones" like "Visual Editor" product using them for deployments, while "MediaWiki" product using them for tarballs? --Malyacko (talk) 20:44, 5 December 2012 (UTC)


 * I invite you to follow up directly with the editors who made those comments; I added the references for this exact purpose :) guillom 09:08, 6 December 2012 (UTC)

Human filter and conduit
Re "There needs to be a human filter and conduit between users and developers, to bubble up serious issues and good ideas with consensus" - obvious COI, but I'm heavily in favour of Platform hiring a me-like figure (who isn't me. I have my hands full with Product ;p). I'd argue it should be a two-way street, though: bringing up good ideas to devs, getting feedback on dev ideas from editors, and acting as a triage of sorts to work out what sort of thing requires consultation/notification. Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 21:29, 5 December 2012 (UTC)


 * I agree on the 2-way street; that's the whole purpose of this project :) Would you generalize this suggestion to all subdepartments in Engineering? i.e., you're the Community Liaison (CL) for the Product group: are you recommending that we hire a CL each for Ops, Features, Mobile, Platform and Language groups? guillom 14:45, 7 December 2012 (UTC)


 * Oliver is I believe actually CL just for the E2 (Editor Engagement) product area, and we occasionally steal him for other Product activities because he's all we have. :-( I think all work areas of WMF Engineering have the need for liaising with the community of people that depend on them, but that doesn't always mean a dedicated person for that work, and it in general doesn't align with the organisational structure of Engineering. For example, Oliver's team (E2) spans Product and Features; someone jointly between Platform and Operations might make a lot of sense as the issues that arise in live are generally from one of those two areas; I believe that the Language team already do excellent work talking to their stakeholder base. There's also the question of which users do we mean - editors of WMF projects? Readers too? Third party MediaWiki sysadmins and users? Volunteer MediaWiki developers? Etc. Jdforrester (WMF) (talk) 18:11, 7 December 2012 (UTC)