Wikimedia Technical Committee

The Wikimedia Architecture committee (ArchCom) strives to ensure the Wikimedia development community builds and deploy increasingly excellent software on the Wikimedia production cluster in a consensus-oriented manner. MediaWiki is at the center of this, but ArchCom's responsibility doesn't end with MediaWiki. ArchCom encourages everyone to file ArchCom-RfCs, participating in weekly meetings that provide an opportunity for anyone in the Wikimedia engineering community to get advice on changes to Wikimedia software that may broadly impact software development on the Wikimedia cluster.

Status
The group strives to keep Architecture committee/Status up-to-date with information about what architecture-related task each member is working on. This document is regularly reviewed in the group's weekly meetings.

Essential duties

 * Coordinate handling of RfCs
 * Document the RFC process and shepherd RfCs as they move through the process
 * Approve (or deny) RfCs
 * Decide whether or not an RfC has achieved consensus from the technical community
 * Discussions about strategic/high-priority projects
 * In rare cases where these types of projects do not fit the RfC model, discuss them and help them get resolved

Processes

 * Review and approve requests for comment (see the RFC process): maintain the ArchCom-RfCs Phabricator workboard, host public RFC meetings to assess and achieve consensus.
 * We strive to have multiple people looking at an RFC before approval, but an individual committee member may approve an RFC if they believe it will be uncontroversial.
 * Discuss strategy / develop recommendations.
 * Help to identify high-priority technical projects and make recommendations to the Wikimedia Foundation, Wikimedia Deutschland, et al. (e.g., revising the very rough roadmap at T96903).
 * Help connect RFC requestors with additional developers (we can't assign resources but we can help connect folks).

Norms

 * Take and share good notes!

Meetings
The Architecture committee has two major meetings weekly
 * An invite-only video discussion, where decisions are often finalized, generally Wednesday 1pm PT as of this writing (minutes)


 * Public architecture meetings: mostly discussions of RFCs on IRC. These are generally Wednesday 2pm PT.

Members

 * Brion Vibber
 * Daniel Kinzler
 * Gabriel Wicke
 * Rob Lanphier
 * Roan Kattouw
 * Tim Starling
 * Timo Tijhof