WMF's Damon Sicore on VE: "Our bad, please help..."

[Randy from Boise]

In what may or may not be a change in the party line at Wikimedia Foundation headquarters, new Engineering boss Damon Sicore has just issued what appears on its face to be a notice of change in the way WMF is going to do business with respect to future Engineering initiatives. His statement in full, published to the Wikimedia-l mailing list, follows:

Dear Wikimedians,

We are changing our engineering processes to improve how we engage with you -- our valued contributors and editors -- around software development.

We are beginning with the collaborative buildout and deployment of VisualEditor. We are moving community engagement processes and product decisions into earlier stages of development, and making them iterative. In a perfect world this process would start prior to feature development, but in this case VisualEditor is already in-flight, so your participation now is critical. With your participation, we can work together to ensure this new process works.

In this new process, we commit to:

• Collectively identify success criteria for each target audience, from new editors (simple feature set) to expert editors (complex feature set).
• Ensure success criteria represents the quantified and qualified goals. The feature will only be shipped when the success criteria is met.
• Enable the feature for only portions of specific audiences that would best benefit (a process known as “incremental roll-out”) at a time.
• Triage and prioritize all bugs and feature requests on a weekly basis to ensure they are addressed in a timely fashion. Publicly post responses, assessment, and target implementations. This will replace the RFP process and ensure we are tracking on all requested features efficiently.

How you can engage:

• Report bugs or enhancement requests in Phabricator: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/tag/visualeditor/
• Join any of the weekly triage meetings to nominate a release blocker. Please see the instructions at: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Talk:VisualEditor/Portal
• Participate in development. You can find the team on IRC in the #mediawiki-visualeditor channel on irc.freenode.net.

We are excited to get this long-standing feature to the level of quality and success we all want and need. It is a collective effort. You are not only a stakeholder, but an active contributor in this work. We want to all to be proud of the outcome. Please participate now.

All my best,

Damon

—
Damon Sicore
VP of Engineering
Wikimedia Foundation
dsicore at wikimedia.org

linkhttps://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/w ... 76781.html[/link]

So the question arises: is this BS to calm the waters and ease a relaunch of Visual Editor as a default on English Wikipedia?

Or is this an authentic mea culpa and notification that processes are changing at WMF Engineering?

Do the tech geeks here have any sense about him and his leadership style compared to the "old regime"? Or is it still too early to tell?

RfB

[Vigilant]

I'll believe when they fire the Mole:man and JDForrester.

No two people in the WMF have done more damage to their development efforts.

Forrester still in the saddle even after such a disastrous tenure:
https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/w ... 76769.html

[Randy from Boise]

To me this seems like a legitimate attempt to make peace with the core volunteer community and recognition that Engineering initiatives have to be a joint venture between the volunteers and the paid staff — with intimation that software creation will henceforth be community need-driven rather than ventures decided upon by brainstorming sessions of engineers in front of a whiteboard at a staff retreat...

Of course, bear in mind that what I see in the Rorschach blots may be different than what you do. I see a heart, you might see a vampire bat...

Compare and contrast to the previous WMF jargon about "building features for users and power-users," etc.

RfB

[Vigilant]

To me this seems like a legitimate attempt to make peace with the core volunteer community and recognition that Engineering initiatives have to be a joint venture between the volunteers and the paid staff — with intimation that software creation will henceforth be community need-driven rather than ventures decided upon by brainstorming sessions of engineers in front of a whiteboard at a staff retreat...

Of course, bear in mind that what I see in the Rorschach blots may be different than what you do. I see a heart, you might see a vampire bat...

Compare and contrast to the previous WMF jargon about "building features for users and power-users," etc.

RfB

I agree that he's making the right noises.
I think we agree that the previous regime was needlessly antagonistic and arrogant.

They won't really be making headway until the previous regime is completely removed from the development effort.
No way I'd trust a new initiative with the same people running it.
It's like they've changed the ownership and banners at a shady used car dealership but kept all the previous sales kritters...


Until the management of the VisualEditor 0.x debacle is completely removed from the VisualEditor 1.x development team, you have limited credibility.



Makes me wonder if changes will be afoot for other reviled projects which were violently thrust into the fundament of the community?
MediaViewer?
SuperProtect?
Flow?

Want to make a difference where some trust can be regained, Mr Sicore?
Insist on rollbacks and/or open conversations about the above projects.
Allow individual wikis to decide what they want running in their worlds.
Trust them.

Release your hostages.

[Kelly Martin]

I'd be more impressed if he were to admit that all of the development done to date is useless and roll the project back to the requirements phase. But perhaps he was able to salvage a project specification out of the shambles of the existing project.

I still think it remains to be seen whether he can get anything useful out of the "resources" he has presently, since most of them are at best marginally competent and most of them are still beholden to Moeller or Forrester and should not be trusted, either to do competent work or to follow direction faithfully.

The concept of a visual editor is not unreasonable, but I think he's still yet to discover that he's better off discarding all progress to date and starting over rather than trying to salvage the work in progress. But we'll see.

[SB_Johnny]

In a perfect world this process would start prior to feature development, but in this case VisualEditor is already in-flight, so your participation now is critical. With your participation, we can work together to ensure this new process works.

I really don't envy him. I like what he's said here, but I wonder if he might have a mandate.

I also agree with Vigilant that the ship isn't going to float if they don't remove the elephantine barnacles. That's not going to be easy.