Development process improvement/Communications recommendations

Over the past few years, the Wikimedia community has perceived an increasing gap between the Wikimedia Foundation and them. This gap has especially been visible in two main areas related to technology:
 * Users have been feeling neglected and ignored when they asked bugs to be fixed or features to be implemented. They don't have a clear understanding of what the best way is to have an impact on technical decisions, or what WMF engineers are working on (and why).
 * Unpaid developers have been perceiving isolationism from paid developers. They too feel excluded from discussions and decisions, notably as a result of paid developers heavily relying on synchronous communication (online or IRL), instead of more conventional asynchronous communication channels unpaid developers have been using.

Until recently, the Wikimedia Foundation didn't have the financial and human resources to have a real product strategy that could satisfy its community of users. With a more stable financial situation, the WMF is now engaged in the process of growing its technical department in order to better support these users. It will be the role of the Product strategy department to find appropriate ways to engage in two-way communication with the users (and other stakeholders) to identify the technical projects the WMF engineers will work on. Still, efforts remain to be undertaken to be more transparent and efficient in one-way communication such as technical announcements. The first part of this document provides some recommendations on this topic.

About the second issue (isolationism of paid engineers), long-time community developers have rightfully argued that the best way to close this gap is for paid developers to work as close as possible to unpaid developers, and to really be a part of the developer community, instead of just "getting feedback". The second part of this document provides recommendations about how to work towards this goal.

Tech announcements
One of the challenges faced by the development and operations community is how to communicate with their users: the local communities of more than 700 wikis using their software and their platform. Software updates or infrastructure changes sometimes need to be advertised to allow users to prepare for them. In the past, the use of inappropriate communication channels has led to information being too prominently displayed or, on the contrary, being lost.

Wiki-independent channels
The following venues should be used only for important announcements:
 * The general Wikimedia announcement list wikimediaannounce-l. This list is moderated.
 * Wikimedia blogs: the Tech Blog and Wikimedia Blog

Large wikis
The largest wikis have community newspapers or other announcements venues. They also have dedicated mailing lists (activity varies). On the other hand, they have a large audience, who may not like disruptive announcements like the use of CentralNotice.

Almost all tech announcements can be left at or sent to the following places:
 * Community newspapers like the Signpost (in English), the Kurier (in German). For a full list of existing community newspapers, see the interlanguage links of the Signpost.
 * Local village pumps (see Distribution list). Some projects have a tech-specific village pump, like the Technical village pump or the Café dos programadores; in this case, the dedicated page should be used. For a full list of such pages, see the interlanguage links of the Technical village pump.
 * Project mailing lists like wikien-l or wikifr-l (see the full list of lists)

On wiki pages, English can generally be used; the message will be translated by local volunteers. Translations are preferred on mailing lists.

The use of CentralNotice is strongly discouraged on large wikis because of its very disruptive nature and its annoyance potential.

Medium and small wikis
Smaller wikis may not maintain a community newspaper, or may not even have a local Village pump. The Distribution list on meta provides links to the village pump where it exists, and to other pages likely to get attention from the local community if there is no village pump (for example, the Community portal or the talk page of the wiki's main page). If this approach doesn't work, it's possible to check the wiki's recent changes and identify active users.

Most small wikis don't have a dedicated mailing list, but it may be possible to reach them through the Wikimedia translators mailing list translators-l.

On small wikis, the use of CentralNotice is less disruptive because of the smaller audience. It is thus possible to use CentralNotice to push important information to the community, but alternate channels should be tried first.

Tools & communication channels

 * Communication

Synchronous and asynchronous communication
Generally, well-established asynchronous communication channels like mailing lists and wikis should be the primary means of communication. This will allow peers not located in the San Francisco office to be as included as possible in discussions and decisions. "Peers" is intended in a loose sense, i.e. every person involved in the development of the technical platform, whether they're paid or not: developers, designers, EPMs, etc.

Synchronous communication has advantages, notably in terms of bandwidth. Phone / video calls can't be avoided completely; when they're absolutely necessary, they should be advertised early and opened to whoever is interested (unless confidentiality is required, which rarely happens). Also, archives, logs or minutes should be made available systematically for documentation purposes. Not only will this allow absent peers to look them up, but it will also attendees to use them as reference.

The paid engineering staff is slowly converting to an agile development methodology. In this methodology, "scrum" meetings are mostly used for task tracking, and not to take decisions. This is a good opportunity to make special efforts to stick to this format, and leave the decision making processes (and their rationale) on public fora.

Project-specific aliases are not used by paid developers. However, private emails are sometimes used for discussions that don't necessarily require confidentiality. Such discussions should be moved to the general development public list. Unpaid developers will generally prefer to get too many mailing list emails detailing projects they're not interested in, rather than having to complain about the lack of transparency every time. This also argues in favor of separating the MediaWiki development discussions from the general wikitech-l list.

MediaWiki and Wikimedia technology
Another current issue is the confusion caused by the similar names used for the organization (Wikimedia) and the software (MediaWiki). A good example of this confusion is the number of MediaWiki users who join the #wikimedia IRC channel instead of #mediawiki to ask for software support. The confusion is even worsened by the fact that we have a unique bug tracker located at bugzilla.wikimedia.org, dealing with issues related to both Wikimedia websites and the MediaWiki software.

There are obviously strong ties between Wikimedia projects and MediaWiki: all Wikimedia projects use the MediaWiki software, and the MediaWiki software is primarily developed with Wikimedia projects in mind. However, there is also a growing community of MediaWiki users who are not Wikimedia users and we should provide them with tools relevant to them. This might be for instance a support forum dedicated to MediaWiki users.

Wikimedia projects and MediaWiki are separate products and they should be acknowledged as such: as a consequence, the separation between bugs in the MediaWiki software, and Wikimedia-specific operations & configuration requests should be made more explicit. Obviously, we would prefer to have a unique back-end to support both sites, particularly to be able to move bugs and requests from one platform to another. Possible names could be http://dev.mediawiki.org and http://tech.wikimedia.org; both are currently unused. They are pretty wide prefixes, because we may host a real project management platform there, rather than just bug trackers.

The separation between MediaWiki and Wikimedia technology happened early as far as IRC channels are concerned. It is only natural to also have separate wikis and mailing lists

Mailing lists

 * Mailing lists

IRC channels

 * MediaWiki on IRC