Architecture committee/2016-11-23

The TechCom planning meeting is a weekly invite-only video discussion, generally held on Wednesday 13:00 USA Pacific Time.
See also TechCom-RFC workboard in Phabricator. (Private minutes)

Present members: Brion, Daniel (chair), Gabriel, Tim, Timo. Kevin is taking notes. Faidon is visiting.

Minutes

• ArchCom soon to meet Victoria (perhaps Dec 7)
• Robla resigns from ArchCom in the wake of leaving WMF. Daniel is doing the chairing for now.
• Ongoing activity:
  • Brion: mobile video
  • Gabriel: thumbnail API (Gabriel), ServiceWorkers for the discovery portal
  • Tim: replacing tidy
  • Timo: oldime table refactoring
  • Daniel: experimenting with the Interwiki overhaul, thinking about db schema optimization
• Talking with Faidon about ArchCom scope, progess, and impact. Some key points that came up:
  • ArchCom should be more active in providing visions and guidelines, such as high level architecture documents.
  • ArchCom should be involved in more of the ongoing development at WMF. People tend to ask ArchCom only if they have to.
  • ArchCom should not only get active when asked. ArchCom scrutiny should not be limited to RFC discussions.
  • For RFC discussions, we too often focus on easy-to-decide topics with limited impact.
  • Lack of ops perspective in ArchCom
  • A clearer scope / charter would be helpful
  • Role of ArchCom needs to be discussed with our new CTO
  • ArchCom has no clear connection to WMF org chart, and no power in resourcing. Platforms (mostly MediaWiki itself) are not well represented in the org chart.
• Up for next week’s IRC discussion: Per-language URLs for multilingual wiki pages (T114662).