Community Tech

The Community Tech team is focused on meeting the needs of active Wikimedia editors for improved, expert-focused curation and moderation tools. The creation of the Community Tech team is a direct outcome of requests from core contributors for improved support for moderation tools, bots, and the other features that help the Wikimedia projects succeed. The team will work closely with the community, and the Community Engagement department, to define their roadmap and deliverables.

See Community Tech project ideas for a community-contributed backlog of possible future projects.

See also their Phabricator profile.

Scope
The team will mainly work on small development tasks that can be iterated on quickly and that will have a direct benefit for the core community.

Tasks that would be in scope could include:
 * Creating gadgets, bots, and wizards to streamline existing community workflows
 * Modifying existing gadgets and bots so that they can work across multiple projects
 * Converting heavily-used gadgets and user-scripts into MediaWiki extensions
 * Building article curation and monitoring tools for WikiProjects
 * Identifying and fixing issues with critical power-user tools that have already been developed, but are not actively maintained, such as AbuseFilter or Citation bot
 * Creating better documentation for power-user tools and features so that they can be better utilized across all projects

Tasks that will not be in scope will include:
 * Maintaining orphaned/abandoned projects from other WMF teams. The rest of engineering must continue to appropriately resource ongoing maintenance of products and features they create.
 * Supporting Community Engagement or other internal WMF teams. If those teams need tools or other software development, they need to be resourced separately (as occurs for Fundraising).
 * Large, long-term development projects like converting Commons to use structured meta-data or creating an entirely new watchlist interface
 * Being the point of contact for all community tech requests. This team will focus on the core community and the tools they need to improve their workflows. Other WMF Engineering teams—or WMF Engineering as a whole—need to consider how they want to address the needs of the overall community (including new and casual editors).

Core community
For the purposes of this team, the "core community" will be defined as those editors who participate in the curatorial and administrative layers of the Wikimedia projects, as well as editors who work on technical features for the projects such as templates, modules, gadgets, user scripts, and bots. For surveys or user metrics, these users can be identified as those who edit in namespaces such as Project, MediaWiki, Template, Category, Portal, Module, etc. as well as the most prolific editors in the Article, File, and Draft namespaces.

Work input and prioritization process
Currently (August 2015), the Community Tech team is only accepting new tasks related to the All Our Ideas survey:
 * Community Tech team/All Our Ideas/Process (current work)

In late September or October we will be opening up a new survey where community members will be able to submit new requests:
 * Community Tech team/Community Wishlist Survey/Process

In the meantime, you are welcome to post ideas at Community Tech project ideas to solicit community input.

Roadmap
This is a tentative roadmap for what the Community Tech team will be working on for the next few months.

August

 * Announce the launch of the Community Tech team
 * Document Community Tech on-wiki
 * Come up with potential criteria for scoring project/task ideas
 * Develop and administer community tech support satisfaction survey
 * Build an initial work backlog for Community Tech based on one or more existing community wishlists
 * Begin working on actual community requests from existing wishlists
 * Create bi-weekly updates to community about work completed

September

 * Plan for community wishlist survey and refine process documentation
 * Launch phase 1 of community wishlist survey (submitting proposals) on meta and invite projects to participate
 * Provide feedback on project/task ideas submitted to survey according to assessment criteria
 * Continue working on community requests from existing wishlists

October

 * Close phase 1 of community wishlist survey
 * Screen submissions for whether or not they are within the scope of the survey
 * Invite translators to translate the proposals
 * Begin phase 2 of community wishlist survey (voting on proposals)
 * Continue working on community requests from existing wishlists

November

 * Close phase 2 of community wishlist survey
 * Move top X(?) technical wishes into a Phabricator workboard and triage according to assessment criteria
 * Begin working on technical wishes from community wishlist survey

Current work
While preparations are being made for a cross-project technical request survey, the Community Tech team has begun working on the requests identified by the community as high priority in the All Our Ideas survey. To view our progress and participate in discussions related to this work, please visit the following page:
 * Community Tech team/All Our Ideas

Completed work
We haven't completed any technical requests yet (we just started on those), but we've knocked out a few bugs in the meantime:
 * Community Tech team/Completed work

Mailing list
If you would like to communicate more directly with the Community Tech team, please join our mailing list (actually a Google Group).