Technical communications

Rationale and timeline
In Fall 2010, Rob Lanphier was contracted to execute an assessment of then-current Wikimedia engineering activities and processes. He also provided recommendations about how to improve said processes.

One of these recommendations was to create "project pages" to increase transparency and accountability, as well as to facilitate volunteer engagement in activities led by Wikimedia engineering staff.

The first project pages were started in late 2010, with little success. Many of them remained stubs, or even empty.

Guillaume Paumier resumed work on this project in March 2011. After putting the infrastructure in place (using templates), he started to create, update, rewrite, and organize the pages.

As of late July 2011, most project pages are in place and up-to-date.

Main pages

 * Wikimedia Engineering — Main portal for Wikimedia engineering activities
 * Wikimedia Features engineering
 * Wikimedia Mobile and Special Projects engineering
 * Wikimedia Platform Engineering

Current work

 * Wikimedia engineering reports (ongoing)
 * Communications support for engineering staff
 * Tech/Ambassadors: improving 2-way communication between "tech people" and editors (content creators & curators). This includes the Fall 2012 consultation.

Documents

 * Status helper — Specifications for a tool (gadget, extension) to make updating statuses less painful
 * Tech blog activity — A monthly activity log of the tech blog broken down by subdepartment (with priority activities listed separately)
 * Development process improvement/Pages organization — Legacy proposal for organizing the project pages