Agenda
----------
- Location: #wikimedia-office IRC channel
- [Meeting type](https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Good_meetings#Taxonomy): Problem definitionTBD
- Time: Weekly, Wednesday 21:00 UTC (2pm [PDT](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/America/Los_Angeles), 23:00 [CEST](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_European_Summer_Time))
- This time is the standard as of this writing (in March 2016), but may change as we make adjustments to accommodate daylight savings/summer time adjustments for the participants. By default, we intend for this meeting to be held Wednesday 2pm [San Francisco time](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/America/Los_Angeles).
- Topic:
- Ad hoc ArchCom office hour
- Briefly touching on Shadow Namespaces (T91162)
- (last minute addition) {T141938}
Meeting summary
---------------
* phab ref T141938: Wikimedia Developer Summit Program -
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T141938 (brion, 21:02:41)
* reminder we are not talking about shadow namespaces this time around
as previously scheduled (brion, 21:05:04)
* per qgil & rfarrand, if need wider invites, would need clearer def of
key topic to help us tell who to invite and to what end (brion,
21:08:34)
* "unconference" style can open participation once we know who to bring
based on what to accomplish (brion, 21:09:38)
* add'l point: <DanielK_WMDE> there seem to be two rather diffrent needs
for a summit: 1) a venue for developers to work on solutions (figure
out *how* to do things) and 2) a venue for developers and users to
meet and figure out what is wanted (figure out *what* to do) (brion,
21:09:47)
* <robla> meeple27 had a great way of putting this: “In-person, annual
version of wikitech-l†(brion, 21:10:35)
* some questioning of whether wikimania is a better place to reach users
and whether/how we can improve WMF engineering's attention there as
well (brion, 21:12:37)
* good point -- <legoktm> I think it is important that we don't lose the
architecture part of the summit. Most of our day-to-day
work/priorities are dictated by the products (in the user-facing
sense) that we work on, and the summit is the one of the few places we
get to work on the actual architecture/tech-debt (something something
no mw core team) (brion, 21:13:12)
* [even if we resolve topic priority, what about followthrough?] <qgil>
In previous years a common frustration has been the disconnect between
Summit topics and what happened after in our actual plans, work,
allocation of resources, goals.... (brion, 21:16:33)
* <legoktm> yes, we do need to prioritize. All I'm saying is that it is
important to also prioritize architecture related discussions, not
just "products" and user-facing features. (brion, 21:18:00)
* [on conferences and getting things moving] <robla> what I feel like
has worked in past years is using WikiDev deadlines as a means of
reviving wikitech-l conversations about big changes we need to make
(brion, 21:20:23)
* [ah now things get interesting] <brion> is it an event to support
implementing the plan, or an event to support making the plan? <qgil>
both, but still having an impact on current and future plans should be
the driver. <bd808> and is it about the WMF's plans or the plans of
the MediaWiki developer community? (brion, 21:23:20)
* <legoktm> Having a good architecture is what enables developers to
implement the rest of the strategy / annual plans. (legoktm,
21:24:06)
* [re tech debt & WMF planning getting better] <subbu> i think this is
always a problem in quarterly planning .. tech debt / maintenance
doesn't figure .. although it is beginning to be factored in (at least
speaking for editing). (brion, 21:28:51)
* [on purpose for inviting] <robla> As we expand beyond WMF in invites,
I would like to expand our developer community (brion, 21:29:57)
* <qgil> An example of a topic would be, let me try again, now at
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/2015_Community_Wishlist_Survey/Results
#3 Central Global Repository for Templates, Lua modules, and Gadgets
-> That is a topic reflecting "user needs", that has many
ramifications all the way to architecture and infrastructure. (brion,
21:33:50)
* <tgr> some concerns simply cannot be directly mapped to user needs;
that does not mean they don't affect them (brion, 21:36:59)
* <qgil> "implement new features quickly" has a clear impact in the user
experience. (brion, 21:37:10)
* some possible disagreement on how much user-visibility topics need
(brion, 21:38:03)
* [on prioritizing within wmf] <cscott> and i tried to explain (at the
time) that quarterly goals were set by product teams, and you'd have
better luck if you made your architecture change part of a product
(brion, 21:40:50)
* <subbu> if i may, i think the dissonance here is that good
architecture has utility in and of itself without having to be
justified in terms of a specific user feature, i.e. architecture is a
cross-cutting concern .. while architectural work can be justified in
terms of user needs, a lot of the time, the connections are very
indirect ... but i suppose, (brion, 21:43:36)
* <cscott> part of the question is: should we be forced to associated
products with architecture? or should we live in an engineering
utopia where good architecture and technical debt reduction are so
self-obvious that they don't need to be justified (brion, 21:47:05)
* <cscott> i'd like to think a little of both, personally (brion,
21:47:15)
* <cscott> that is, i think it should be entirely engineering's job to
justify the product side; i think part of management's role in
enabling engineers and good engineering will be to do some of the
legwork to find product-based subgoals in a larger architectural
project (like wikidata) (brion, 21:48:09)
* <qgil> Ultimately, the problem I would like to see solved in the
Summit 2016 is: productive discussions that lead to actual plans,
resources, releases, deployments (brion, 21:48:21)
* [reminder: tech debt rules all] <robla> I think I've gotta come back
to http://www.daedtech.com/human-cost-tech-debt/ (brion, 21:49:25)
* much agreement on "productive discussions that lead to actual plans,
resources, releases, deployments" being key! (brion, 21:50:31)
* LINK: http://www.daedtech.com/human-cost-tech-debt/ (DanielK_WMDE,
21:51:07)
* <robla> brion: yeah, I think WMF needs to use the Dev Summit as a tool
for listening to our dev community, not for setting their agenda
(DanielK_WMDE, 21:53:21)
* <qgil> Defining a few important topics beforehand allows us to assure
that there will be more and more diverse people at the Summit ready to
discuss them. Letting the decision of these main topics to the end
means that these topics will be discussed basically by the usual
participants of the Summit only (core-ish devs), which means that the
chances of (brion, 21:53:26)
* <tgr> do we have any evaluation of how successful last year was?
(brion, 21:55:49)
* <robla> I think we should probably take the remainder of the
conversation to #wikimedia-tech, wikitech-l@, and the Phab task
(brion, 21:57:44)
* key issues raised include: how to select topics (user focus? tech
debt? both?) / how to get product teams to priotize tech debt-archy
issues / and how to ensure good followup (brion, 21:58:40)
* program note: next week's IRC conv is cancelled because of WMF
planning session happening in SF (robla, 21:59:00)
* program note: next week's IRC conv is cancelled because of WMF
planning session happening in SF (brion, 21:59:01)
Meeting ended at 21:59:15 UTC.- TBD (for discussion in comments)
Log
----
{P3996}
People present (lines said)
---------------------------
* brion (96)
* qgil (63)
* tgr (44)
* DanielK_WMDE (34)
* robla (28)
* cscott (27)
* subbu (14)
* legoktm (14)
* bd808 (8)
* Scott_WUaS (5)
* wm-labs-meetbot (3)
* stashbot (3)
* wm-labs-meetbot_ (3)
* rfarrand (2)
Other meetings
------------------
| **[Architecture meetings](https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Architecture_meetings) ** |
|-----------------|
| 13:00 PT ArchCom Planning Meetings | [upcoming](https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/calendar/query/DlzGwrbxMLu9/) | [all since 2016-03-30](https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/calendar/query/M4fMy2PZOBQQ/) |
| **14:00 PT ArchCom-RFC Meetings** | **[upcoming](https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/calendar/query/ShzbHT6BPGCE/)** | **[all since 2015-09-09](https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/calendar/query/XJjy54s3PEFf/)**