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Organize the first Developer Wishlist survey
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Description

At the T149635: [WikiDev17] Developer Wishlist meeting, it was agreed that the Technical Collaboration team will organize a Developer Wishlist survey with the goal of obtaining a prioritized backlog of wishes from developer for developers by February 15. As proponent and first driver of the idea, @Tgr will oversee this program.

Key drivers:

  • February 15! Non-negotiable. This is the latest point of time to meaningfully influence the Wikimedia Foundation Annual Plan 2017-18. Any other aspect of this project will adapt to this requirement.
  • Inspiration on the Community Wishlist success. In case of hesitation, we will follow that precedent.
  • Experimental mindset, a list is better than no list, perfect is the enemy of good, the second time will be better... With just a month to deliver, we have no time for deep discussions or bike-shedding.

Steps:

  • Get https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Developer_Wishlist to a point good enough to announce the survey. Basically this boils down to explaining the scope, the process, and instructions to participate.
  • Announce the survey in as many Wikimedia & MediaWiki technical spaces as possible.
  • Triage proposals as they come with the goal of selecting the valid ones.
  • Decide and implement a voting process.
  • Voting period.
  • Announcement of results by February 15.

Event Timeline

Qgil added a project: Developer-Wishlist.

I have the ambitious goal of soft-launching the survey today. The objective is to allow people to start proposing and triaging wishes while we figure out the voting phase.

Developer-Wishlist and Developer-Wishlist (2017) exist now. The first one will be used for organization tasks (like this one) while the 2017 milestone will be used to tag candidates for wishes.

Wishes will be proposed directly in Phabricator. They can be existing or new tasks. They need to have these fields in the description:

  • Problem:
  • Who would benefit:
  • Proposed solution:
  • Proposer:

Later today I will review https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Developer_Wishlist with the intention to document everything needed for people to start proposing wishes. There are some topics that could potentially become lengthy discussions (like the name or scope of the survey) but I will take shortcuts favoring the most open and flexible options. We can fine tune later. Then I will announce to wikitech-l and other basic places.

Following tasks include to announce the survey more exhaustively, triage proposals as they come, and organize the voting phase. I hope to have a clear idea about who owns these tasks soon. I am taking the initial launch but I am willing to pass the coordination to @srishakatux as soon as we have got the time to talk.

Sounds good to me. I'd only be cautious about getting people to write the fields you set out in the description block — for existing tasks, that sounds like it could disrupt teams' workboards/etc. ways of working which'd not be ideal.

Hm, good point. Required for new tasks, desired for existing tasks but please check before with the current owners or related teams if any?

Wikitech-l: https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2017-January/087387.html
With this, I am not the bottleneck for further promotion of the survey anymore. I have to jump to a flight in a few minutes! See you later. :)

@srishakatux, your help is most welcomed promoting the Developer Wishlist in the channels listed at https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Topic:Tj9isptyrmdkcvmd. We can continue this conversation there if you wish.

Hey @Tgr, wondering if you might want to consider writing a post about the dev wishlist for Wikimedia blog? Talking about the idea, the design process you followed and announcing the results. @Qgil thoughts?

A blog post would be great!