- Title of session: Fostering a more collaborative approach to tool development
- Session description: Toolforge projects are often created and maintained by a single person. Could they become more collaborative? In this discussion, we want to identify measures to shift the culture among technical volunteers to enable that collaboration. As a potential contributor to Toolforge projects, what is holding me back from getting involved in maintaining existing tools, or on-boarding other contributors into the tools I maintain?
- Username for contact: @Pintoch
- Session duration (up to 90min): 60
- Session type (presentation, workshop, discussion, etc.): Discussion
- Language of session (English, Arabic, etc.): English
- Prerequisites (some Python, etc.): Some idea of the Toolforge platform
- Any other details to share?: This is a follow-up from a discussion at Wikimania 2024 with @waldyrious and another one with @Arcstur this week.
- Interested? Add your username below:
Notes
We discussed various ways to make it easier to get involved in small codebases in the Wikimedia ecosystem.
Among the possible measures mentioned, there were:
- a way to identify toolforge tools with a single maintainer, or with a latest commit far in the past
- a warning for tool maintainers that they are the single maintainers, with an encouragement to onboard more people
- a gitlab bot to add PR owners as new maintainers
- the automated merging of PRs if sufficient "untrusted" people approve
- a Jazzband-style organization for collective maintenance of:
- either top-tier tools, used by a lot of people
- or lower-stake tools, with a broader pool of people