Hi, Alex. Good questions. On 02/28/2010 08:10 PM, Alex wrote: >> > When might that be? Is there a specific deadline? If not, why? And if >> > there >> > is a deadline and it slips by yet again, what's the consequence to those >> > running the project? >> > >> > I second this. Are William and Howie just under contract indefinitely > until FlaggedRevs is finally "ready"? Who are they responsible to, and > why is that person apparently not giving them any sort of priorities > (like, creating a plan or a deadline)? >
As to who I'm responsible to, that was Erik Moeller and is becoming Danese Cooper. We of course have a plan, which is publicly posted, and which I'm glad to answer questions on. Elsewhere in this thread (and in the blog post) I've explained why I haven't just made up an arbitrary deadline, but am instead trying to measure productivity and project a date. If you have further questions on this, let me know. Regarding incentives, I believe that this project borrowed Howie part time from the Usability Team, who will welcome having him back when we're done. For my part, I certainly have an reason to get this done soon. Like everybody, I thought this would go quicker, and I gave WMF a 70% discount from my normal rate, because heck, I love Wikipedia. But each week this goes on means a slightly larger hole in my 2010 revenue picture. A worthwhile one, to be sure, but I'd still like to keep it as small as possible. > Why is there such little transparency in this whole process? Rather than > use the normal bug tracker that all other MediaWiki developers use and > that the community is used to, they're using some entirely separate one, > hosted on a 3rd party website. See my explanation elsewhere in the thread, but basically, I'm not tracking bugs, and Bugzilla is a poor fit for the approach I thought best. I used the fastest-to-use tool that suits that approach, so as to maximize the time spent on actual work. Nobody has mentioned an issue with it until now. If people would rather I also tracked a bunch of tickets in Bugzilla we can talk about that, and I'm eager to hear other suggestions for ways to increase transparency. > As far as I can tell, there's only been > one unprompted communication with the community regarding this - the > techblog post in January that had little new information. > I've reported when I thought I had something to report, and I've certainly answered direct questions from people. I'm definitely planning to announce boldly when we actually have something to show, and I'll do that far and wide. Although I considered it, it didn't seem useful to send out a "hey, still working" update in the meantime. Partly because there's not a great venue for it, and partly because the subsequent roiling of the waters takes up time and energy I'd rather see productively used. But mainly because it's hard to do that without throwing under the bus whatever person or group is currently the bottleneck. And not only is that unfair, but it's terrible for both morale and productivity, so it seemed like waiting for a labs update was the best option. I'm open to suggestions, though, so definitely drop me a line (perhaps off list?) if you want to discuss something. William _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
