 Good morning, everyone I'm speaking it's very weird because I'm speaking to a very empty room and hopefully there are lots of you online but I'll pretend that you're all here and I can see you so I'm Victoria Coleman and I've got Toby Negrin here with me we're gonna do our best to try and answer some of the questions that were left on the table during the Deaf Summit Q&A that we did and of course any other questions that come up today during the discussion we'll be more than happy to take those as well. While it's lonely here I know we have an active IRC line going so you know we'll get started by answering the top four questions that emerged on the list since January but feel free to use IRC to interject or ask questions outside the floor. So looking at these four, yeah. Thank you Victoria just a just a quick note we can't talk about the turkey situation on advice of our communications and legal team it's ongoing we're working hard but you know we can't we can't comment publicly on it so just just a heads up. Alright the first question that I have on the list here is for WMF development teams what is the right balance between pushing on work versus seeking and supporting volunteer contributions and it's obviously a little bit of a loaded question you know perhaps the balance has not always been right in the past. I think what drives what the deaf teams do inside the foundation is our annual plan so we just spent like felt forever maybe like three months trying to decide what our priorities should be and on the basis of those priorities the teams within the foundation certainly within technology and I'm sure is between product as well have come up with a set of things that they need to get done in order to serve the movement best. I will say from my perspective one thing that is different in the way that we did our planning and technology this year is that aids programmatic in the sense that everything that we do is a program versus a team effort so there's a this programs tend to be aggregates of work that comes from a variety of teams not just one team. We also have made a commitment to recognize what platforms we build, run and operate within tech and that will help us in figuring out what the roadmap ought to be for those platforms. Once we have this roadmap then this is something that you can communicate of course to the developer community outside and they can say well I agree with that or I don't agree with that or I would like to contribute to this or that so it will give us a vehicle through which we can have conversations that hopefully will bring us in much more harmony with the developer community outside and also allow us to leverage their hard work towards common objectives. Maybe Toby you have something to add to that? Yeah this is a super interesting question and I think there are kind of two examples of sort of the nature of how this works and how this might work in the future and I think the first is sort of the sub-bottom of the community tech team which is don't dash the hopes and dreams of volunteer developers which is one of the things I like. I know in the past there's been sort of a feeling that when the foundation gets involved in a project the foundation sort of tries to own that project and I think that's something whether it's true or not is something that we're very deliberately moving away from. One of the things that community tech found when they first did their wishlist survey was that there were already volunteer developers working on some of these things and some of these volunteers just needed you know a little bit of technical advice a little more resources to actually bring these things to a conclusion and I think that the internet archive bot was probably you know that the or the deadlink bot was was a good example of how this relationship can really work and can be the proverbial win-win for both the community you know for ultimately the editors and readers but also the technical community and the foundation and then the the other thing I wanted to call out is sort of a longer arc and that's around some of the new readers work where we did user research we've talked about this a lot in other venues but we found that offline access was really important and we also found that there were a lot of community developers and and other folks working on the offline problem and so we've done a lot of things at least three different things the first is we started working very closely with some of these offline community folks such as Kiwik such as Doc James and Wikimad and seeing how we can support each other better there have been certain certain products that the foundation particularly the offline content generator that the foundation has has taken upon itself to to fix and replace with a better system and then finally there is sort of sharing the the sharing the the research that we have with other folks and I guess partnerships has also been involved sort of sharing the resources that we have with other folks to find on places where both community and foundation offline products can actually be used such as schools and other heavily other areas without a lot of connectivity so I think these sort of you know these examples sort of illustrate I think different ways the foundation in the community can work together to benefit everybody thank you I don't know if there any questions the IRC on this one doesn't look like it so the next question do we have a plan to bring our developer documentation to the level of the top internet website a major free software project and I again I take that first and I'll pass it down to Toby on on the technology department side what we're actually doing this year is investing a little bit in a tech rider most of that most of that effort to most of the cycles will be invested in the Wikimedia Cloud services team because that's where of course you know many many of our volunteers you know a cut the teeth and also built many of their solutions and I know it's a particular pain point so we will be as part of our annual plan for next year will be investing in a tech rider to help us move that forward but I know that you know beyond that there's been a lot of activity going on within the product team especially even this past week and I'd like to ask Toby to give us a little bit of an insight into that yes so we had a media wiki documentation day on Friday which was was really awesome and we had a lot of we had a lot of both community and foundation work on documentation so yeah I think you know between hiring professionals to help with the documentation and being more more I guess organized and mindful about working with the community ourselves to increase the documentation I think it's going to get better in the next year as far as sort of you know the quality of a top of a top website I think you know the quality is pretty is pretty up and down but I think we are you know it is it is something that we're working on is it is something that I expect to improve in the next in the next year all right question number three there's just a bit of talk on the IRC about the tricky situation it is the tricky turkey situation the fact that Wikipedia and all of our sites are currently blocked in the country of turkey all right so I I see there's a question there from Rachel about why we cannot comment and the reason why we cannot comment as Toby said is that there is an ongoing legal process that the foundation is part of in in Turkey to try and find a resolution to this blocking of our site so it's we've been advised by legal to be really careful about the remarks that we make because the major part lies not process all right so if we move to the third question this is about how volunteers can can influence what we do how can volunteers bring ideas and influence the WMF annual plants and goals the sense being when the plants are actually published it's kind of late and I sympathize with that I mean this is the first time that I've been through the annual planning process and certainly it's intensive it takes a long time and I know by the time like like we were finished with it everybody was just so happy just to put it behind us right so it was like oh this is done but it does have the the side effect that it presents the community with more or less what we're more or less a kind of finalized artifact in some sense right so we've done a lot of work within the foundation and the teams to decide you know what we should be working on what matters the most this year we had lots of you know conversations about trade those are going to make and so on and then you know how it comes I do understand the need to engage the community more broadly earlier I think we will have a number of opportunities to do that and I'm thinking specifically when it comes to the technology the volunteer community study next year of course we will have a different version of the depth summit that went in previous years so in January of next year you know we'll get together to talk about specifically the technology needs of the movement strategy because by then we will have a movement strategy and that would be a thing of an ideal opportunity for the community outside to help us figure out how we should be prioritizing and what it is that they think they can do in collaboration with us to meet this overall kind of technology goals that will set ourselves as a result of having a strategy a movement strategy so that's one kind of concrete way that I think we can engage the other way of course again is through the roadmaps that we hope to build in technology if you know it takes a mediocrity right if there's no road map like if you don't know what the team is thinking about doing how can you even influence them today you can influence them somewhat through the architecture committee work but there isn't you know a stated plan that you can either contribute to or disagree with and just by making these things public I think we'll create a forum where people can engage with and contribute ideas solutions and perhaps different opinions as well maybe Toby would like to take that as well yeah first of all I'd like to invite people from the community to take part in the strategy process Catherine has has shared a lot of information on Wikimedia L we can also relay relay relay these links we had a really cool strategy session at Wikimedia conference a couple of I guess last month and this was it was well organized it was was well facilitated and we got a live really useful input from the from the community which will be woven into our strategic goals because this is really where it begins sort of setting these high level goals and I think this is you know if there's something that you really care about trying to map it back to a strategic goals to a set of users to to a specific impact this is this is the best this is the best way at a high level to do it because you know we this is how we plan right we have a specific we have specific impact in mind and then we develop features to try to have that desired impact like like that's how it works I know it always hasn't been super transparent I know it hasn't always been been easy to get involved and we're really hoping that this can that that these kinds of of relationships and pathways can be can we can be better over the next few years in reading we've tried we've had I think more than 20 community consultations both on the strategic side and on more around features and we've gotten I think middling response but it's been one of the things that we've been really thinking we've been really trying to think a lot about because generally at the sort of strategic level to impact level where a lot of these these plans begin we haven't gotten a lot of feedback and that's not you know it's sometimes it's just hard to to think at that level when you care about it when you care about a specific thing the best feedback that we've gotten has been when we've been specific like here's a specific feature here's a specific treatment that we're interested in doing but also proactive also really so being specific and early has been where we've gotten the most useful feedback and so we've been you know we've been looking at what's worked and what hasn't worked in the past we've been talking to community folks to try to figure out the exact model but you know as of right now start with strategy also we've tried to you know we are pretty good about publishing our draft quarterly goals again we don't get the kind of feedback that I wouldn't say looking for but we haven't gotten a lot of feedback and sort of you know understanding sort of the practical nature about how we solicit feedback how we incorporate feedback is important there I guess no questions on that from the IRC so the fourth and final question that I have here is about media wiki what vision do you see for media wiki and volunteer developers five years from now well I I don't really know what it will look like five years out but one of the things one of the things that I was able to do I had the opportunity to to meet with some third party media wiki developers and users at the enterprise media wiki conference last month I think maybe about six weeks ago and you know one of the interesting things the factoids that I learned there is that actually more than half of the media wiki commits today happen from people outside the foundation people that don't work here so you know it's a remarkable kind of success story of an open source project and no matter what else happened my hope is that five years out we will still have a very vibrant open source community and the community of volunteers that help us you know build this you know really important kind of piece of software for the for the movement having said that of course that's not gonna it's not gonna just happen without us engaging with the community of volunteers more deeply and helping understand their needs as well as the broader needs as we see them in the movement and will hope to do a lot of this coordination certainly through the roadmaps that I talked about but also through another vehicle that we're putting together which is a revamped version of the architecture committee so many of you I'm sure had an opportunity to work with them in the past to write rfcs type rfcs being reviewed and perhaps worked on and resolved by them we are actively now working to you know strengthen the way that the architecture committee works and also broaden its set of responsibilities it's likely that we will rename it to the technology committee because we want to we want to have senior people senior technically with the foundation engage across the board and the technologies that we need to deliver on a mission as well as what they do today which is mostly media wiki so you can you can expect to see an expanded scope and in the architecture committee but that will also continue to be a vehicle through which we engage the community outside and of course the community outside can be represented on that committee they can be represented today and that will not change so this is like one this is an organizational if you like a response to this question but then there's a substantive question which is you know do we go going forward continue to rely very significantly on if on what is a fairly monolithic code base or do we move more into a kind of service oriented solution as you all know today we have both we want both a pretty robust a substantial code base around media wiki and then we also are investing in services so one of the kind of technical choices that's coming down the pike for us in the next six months or so will be precisely at which way we decide to go what do we factor and when and for what purposes it's something that i think would make sense for us to wait to decide on until such time as we really do have guidance from the movement strategy but it's nonetheless one of the big questions that i as the cto have on my plate to engage the community with going forward this this coming year and there are pluses and minuses of course in both in both solutions one thing that i think it's obvious to everybody is that the kinds of services that we rely on to deliver our experience are not things that we can build ourselves not all of them search been an obvious one right so and there are many others machine translation is the other one it's it's impossible to think of a future where we don't build a software solution to deliver a mission around that does not allow the easy incorporation of services that others built with that maybe i'll pass it on to toby and we can hear his thoughts on that yeah i think i'd like to like it to be easier like i totally agree with everything that that victoria says but i just think from a developer perspective it should be easier it should be easier to write it should be easier to write code it should be easier to write services it should be easier to deploy art to consume wikimedia services media wiki services should be easier to test i mean we have a very interesting challenge in that media wiki has a substantial third party use substantial community development and also supports one of the biggest websites on the planet this is this is hard um and and it's hard but it's also part of the magic of this place and it's something that we need to be mindful about continuing to support and i think we just need to to you know the architecture issues are are critical but i think if we are to you know truly continue to embrace our community we do have to make it easier to contribute to a site like wikipedia and i know there are people other than me who have a lot better developed ideas around this and how we might do this um but that's you know that's what i think if if if this is something that we want and it is then we need to think about how we can do it a little bit better i couldn't i couldn't agree more right um of course as engineers we don't always think you know like easy comes first like uh we do stuff and then oh it would have been nice to if we made that easy so it's good to have voice of wisdom like to to to think about creating a platform that people can easily contribute to and uh you know have you know easy kind of you know commit cycles and so on and that's something that we should definitely take into into account um i just happened to look behind my back here on the IRC and there was a question about where is the data coming from regarding the number of commits uh so i'll be happy to share that i don't have it right here with me uh this was given to me by the media wicked stakeholders group um some of you may be aware i think all of you are aware that there are many third-party users of the media wicked software many of them are involved in supporting enterprises many of them in the government so there is a very active group of contributors and developers uh and in fact it was them that organized this enterprise media wicked conference uh i asked them while i was there for this information and this is what they produced and like i say i'll be happy to share that offline with with you all um so do we have any more questions anything that anybody wants to raise anything that came on the IRC while we're speaking that i didn't see folks in San Francisco there is one question on IRC which is that um i feel as if WMF development is under advertised and user users usually have to seek it out to learn how to start volunteer development how could this be addressed it's a good question um a number um a number of options exist but i i think that the primary vehicle that we use to to bring people to the you know to the coast here is through the hackathons the hackathons are first and foremost events where we make the tools and software you know visible and available to new developers and also there are places where we actively support them and help them become familiar and begin to contribute and there's of course a hackathon coming up next week uh what you will typically see there is of course the community engagement people in particular uh kim gillsteam uh who saw uh i guess purpose is precisely the help um empower the volunteer community the volunteer development community uh they see the hackathons as the primary tool for uh engaging people and empowering them you will also see brian davis there are they the the head of our uh wikimedia cloud services team and brian and his team make it a point of attending any all hackathons they can lay their hands on precisely to be there and be able to support um new people that want to to onboard so this is a kind of a critical piece in our strategy for bringing new developers to the platform and making it a little easier although not quite as easy perhaps to be with with aspire to and the rest of us with aspire to so if you if you go to the if you go to wikipedia it's it's relatively i wouldn't say super clear but it's pretty clear that if you want to edit the site you can if you want to make changes to the content you can um around december in english-speaking countries it's pretty obvious how you might contribute to contribute money to wikipedia but it seems to me that we don't make it clear uh that you could actually contribute to the software itself and that also might be you know an interesting thing to think about you could even go to so far as to see like if you are reading the article on media wiki maybe we might actually show you you know a way to get involved on the technical side um you know i think we're thinking a lot about um building our communities and broadening our communities and the technical community is is is just you know it's just like editors it's just like donors in the sense that you know you need to reach people who might want to be involved and you need to provide them with pathways for getting into the organization you can do things in an offline fashion like through the hackathons and through the editathons and and other ways of of becoming part of the community but you can also do it through the online uh through online mechanisms and this might be something that that we could think uh a little bit more about in the future so um to to to this point maybe uh if brian davis or brian is there maybe i'll ask brian just to to comment a little bit because now brian is a beautiful deck that describes what wiki media cloud service is all about and the very first slide is that uh we should make uh making a contribution to the code base is easy as writing an article so i think he is absolutely kind of you know um has the the right set of objectives and maybe brian you can share a few thoughts about how you see that um that happening now with a new team how it's going to be different how do you think from your point of view we can empower people um and help them make contributions in an easier way sure um i mean there's there's no there's no magic answer right um we're we're not flipping some switch and and everything that has always been annoying is going to be better tomorrow um but i i think the the formation of of the cloud services team which is rearranging what was called the the labs team under tech ops and um the role that i previously had as uh kind of a tool labs developer liaison and community tech team um into a proper top level team in the technology department at the foundation i think that really you know shows that that this is making it easier to to contribute technically and and specifically supporting um with the compute and data service needs that that developers need to make a technical process on wiki better is something that the foundation is is putting you know putting weight behind it's it's not just uh idle talk um in in the really grand scheme of things there's some uh there's a there's a presentation that that uv gave at uh uc berkeley i think uh last fall up on on comments that people can find that that talks about democratizing programming by bringing the wiki way to software development and i think in the the really really long term those are the things that we're excited about um working on tools like quarry and pause that um get rid of a lot of the technical complexity you don't need ssh keys and you don't need to know hopefully a whole lot about how the unix command line works and instead bringing you know some nice web-based software um to bear where people can can just get to the meat of the problems that they want to solve which is digging through the data and finding the important bits and and putting that back to work on the wikis yeah i think brian also has some some really good ideas about building communities around specific pieces of functionality um it may be hard to contribute it may be harder to contribute to media wiki harder than it was 10 years ago but there's lots of other software that runs wikipedia um lots of bots for example and lots of services uh that those bots can leverage that might be an easier path to becoming a media wiki developer sati wenti of mics so many mics um this might be a silly question um and i wasn't here for the first part so feel free to tell me that you already answered this as i listened to what you were saying just for the half i was here for it struck me that i actually don't know what you mean when you say the community like sometimes i understand you're talking about those who are like a technical developer who wants to contribute to media wiki you victoria we're talking about the people who are actually using media platform to run their own instances um i think now brian was kind of talking about people who may not want to contribute to media wiki but have other skills that they can perhaps contribute in the future um there's obviously editors there's obviously readers it seems like the scope of your community is really broad um and so i'm wondering i guess the first part of my question is so when you say the community what are you really referring to and then the second part is that um when you talk about community engagement right whether that's on annual plan or feature rollout or product design like how do you engage with this pretty diverse and expansive set of people yeah so um you're absolutely right and they uh the community that we that we address here is indeed very diverse and has different objectives i would say that when i say community like when i came to this meeting i wasn't thinking about editors i wasn't thinking about contributors i i wasn't thinking about people that use the end product of our work i was thinking about the people that power the engine that delivers that work um and those people are of course are some of them inside the foundation some of them are outside the foundation making uh individual contributions perhaps the media wiki perhaps to other pieces of code that we have there could be people that use instances as you say and and even though that might appear to be not particularly related to what we do matter of fact it is because oftentimes they take features that we build and exercise them to scale so they do a great deal of testing for us that we couldn't possibly do inside uh so it's all part of a um of a kind of flywheel if you like there are also people as you point out that come to us because they have other projects that they want to work on so they come to labs for example where we give them many resources to build out their ideas we give them access to data which is gold for them um so what do we do that well we do that because uh being part of an open source community for us is fundamental in the way that we see how the foundation builds and delivers on its mission so it could be that somebody who comes today in in cloud services and you know builds a bot that they use for something else and becomes familiar with the with the tools and what we do tomorrow might be a volunteer that will come in and build a feature for us that we might really need in a project somewhere else so we have a pretty kind of pluralistic view about how all this um how this community comes together um I think your second question is also a question that came uh from the folks in um in the community um I don't think there's a perfect way for us to do that given how diverse it is but some of the things that we can do are for example liais with special interest groups so if you take the media weekly stakeholders group they're the people that uh do enterprise users so they have one point of view they can come to us with a set of things that they want and we may say well you know these two things we can do because they're consistent with what the community needs these other things we cannot do it gives us a pathway to have this um this this conversations we couldn't have that discussion even without having a roadmap of our own so that you know because like if you don't know where you're going one thing is for sure all roads will take you there and I I think just by like putting a stake in the ground we can now have some negotiations and some conversations around uh what what works what fits what doesn't fit um there'll be any ideas yeah I think in in general we are becoming far more mindful about this term the community which is Victoria said it's it's a nebulous term and you know if you write a bot that fixes grammar mistakes on the projects are you part of the technical community are you part of the editor community are you part of both but you know these are these are these are interesting these are these are super interesting problems and I think that part of why it's fun to work here but you know for for product we worked with um we had a project to try to understand our audiences better and I think there's there are a few posters around and I think you've you've seen it it was in our annual plan I think this is the first step like Victoria pointed out this is the first step like let's just figure out what the various audiences are and then the next step is to start figuring out okay which are the most important this year which are the most important next year what are their particular strategies that we can use to reach those audiences and to grow those audiences so you know hopefully that answers that you know that it's a little bit more color around the second around the second of your questions but to the to the first it's primarily the technical community that I feel but even within the technical community there are various facets and and you know and just to sort of wax a little put more poetically here like sort of the fact that there is a huge research community around wikipedia is awesome the fact that there is a huge you know developer community like these are like these are great and hopeful things and um you know the but but there are sort of basic rules about building these communities that we can use to to to encourage the growth their growth also I think um it's kind of great because in some cases we'll have experience with kind of methods that work in this particular case um you know we'll have kind of a great um great success I think in community tech where I know for a long time there was a kind of great deal of anxiety about how do we listen to the community how to prioritize what they have to say the community tech team has done a spectacular job in collecting these ideas and working with the community to prioritize and then begin delivering on them one of the things one of the ideas that was floated at Dev Summit back in January was to create a developer wish list and this is something that I think makes a ton of sense and it's something that you know hopefully we can also put in you know interaction and hopefully emulate the success of the community tech team has seen so far that that could be a very direct way of influencing features and so on it's something that Kim's team is thinking about in community engagement and something that will definitely be more than happy to support in both in tech and product I'm sure there's one question um in the long term does WMF try to absorb parts of the community into itself or does it benefit WMF to leave the community as is there's there's an interesting book called Good Degrade in the Social Sector and it's only like 25 pages yeah and it's actually it's it's definitely worth it I mean it's a it's a it's a business book for sure but I think one of the most interesting parts of it is it it sort of takes like commonly held sort of business practices and applies them to non-profit or community oriented organizations and I think one of the most interesting metaphors in this book was helping see the WMF not at the top of a hierarchy but at the center and so I would like to see moving forward much more cooperation between the WMF and these community community institutions whether they be chapters whether they be individual developers whether they be events and really try to figure out how we can work together to benefit the benefit our benefit that the project in general new readers in our in our work with with qx and wikimid I think we're starting to see some ways of how this can work community tech Brian's work with labs just in general work with with developers but I really feel like like we want to make the whole greater than the sum of the parts by working together I couldn't agree more so I haven't read the book and I should read the book especially since 25 pages I can I can do that but I I just want to quote I think it was Bill Gates who said it doesn't matter how many smart people you have inside your organization there always gonna be many more smarter people outside and that is true for companies it certainly is true for the movement I mean in my mind and I think you know historically the foundation has been an enabler for the community without the community of both you know of contributors and you know developers I don't think the foundation would have been anywhere near as successful as it has been in bringing knowledge to knowledge to people so in my mind it's like it's absolutely essential if the if we lose you know patch or the support of community both on the contribution side and the kind of developer side I don't think we will succeed an objective so for us maintaining and empowering that community is absolutely vital I mean of that I have no doubt and I think you will see that also reflected in the movement strategy directions that are already emerging having a healthy vibrant well-connected community to the mission is absolutely essential thing for our success any other questions from the room doesn't seem to be anything on the IRC unless you see something if not maybe we'll take a bow we'll thank you all for maybe you all should take a bow thank you for joining us and we'll continue this conversation I what I would like to do and we'll continue working with with Kimstein community engagement is to keep the conversation the dialogue open this is just one of the tools that we have I would like to have a perpetual kind of list of questions matter of fact and then you know answer the ones that are most popular or like the most prominent people's minds in the regular cadence it took us a little while like to get to this point I mean we it was January when we did the last one today as I guess May I'd like to do them maybe like every two months just to be you know a bit more responsive something for us to to work towards the more frequent I think we'll make these exchanges the better off we're going to be in terms of both alignment communication and success at the end of the day so with that thank you all both here and those of you remotely watching and listening both now and in the future thank you all thank you