I met James at the first WikiCite in Berlin, though I had heard people talk about him in the WM NYC chapter. Hare had set up an off-Wiki interface to keep track of metrics that he let our chapter clone and use. James was semi-responsive after I put in a year's worth of event info -- which was a lot. I think that was at the peak period of activity for Wikimedia NYC. I couldn't get the reports to run and we needed the info for our reporting for our annual grant so finally at the last hour I exported everything to Excel and word processed the results. Which Winifred Oliff, our grant officer, said didn't tell enough of a "story". Hours and hours of work, tons of graphs and raw data.
Essentially, James Hare said that I broke his system there (wish I could remember the name of the online tool but am blanking now). Anyway, he said it wasn't able to handle the data and number of events.
But really why I am describing this here, is that he was not responsive to emails and requests from me. I learned about his work on Project X during the few times he did email me back because he mentioned it was taking up all of his time and attention. I looked at the implementation and had a lot of pretty basic functionality questions. I have done a lot of beta testing from the end-user / power-user perspective in real life. I was concerned about the user interface and square peg into round hole issues that I could see right off the bat in how it was in the WiR build.
I know James Hare is very young (as a person) and had a lot of enthusiasm. But I wasn't impressed with his responsiveness (and lack thereof). Or ability to translate concepts into workable outcomes. But then again, I thought Project X was "his" project. That's how it sounded like it was to me. Had no idea he was "just" (just?) a project manager / cog in the wheel on it.
I'm not surprised at the bumps on the road re: Project X. Editing Wikipedia and managing task lists for initiatives -- which I was doing using Wikidata (and which was brilliant when it was working) -- is a LOT of freaking work. The curation of that should be structurally supported (again, I think Wikidata is great for this) without taking up so much time managing by volunteers the way it exists now. Editathon in a box concepts spring to mind. Art+Feminism could've done this given the good will and so much press they had. But instead put their focus outside Wiki, stopping their use of on Wiki meetup pages, etc.
I think fundamentally in all of these processes there's a distinct disregard and underlying contempt for the end user. Just like when James Hare was surprised that I had diligently input so much data, to the point I broke the system (he joked), and was surprised at that, I was like, well, what do you expect? I did what you said to do, there's masses of data input, and just because I'm not a programmer doesn't mean I am a lunkhead.
I have enough technical knowledge to be dangerous and ask stupid questions, yes. But also from having a master's in library science and that formalized knowledge, plus my muscular editing / word processing skills, I get the end user interface / experience needs. And Project X needed / needs a ton of work from that perspective.
- Erika
handwringing, but also fascinated reading what was / is going on here with this project. so much T&E. not surprised folx got burnt krispy
-- edit --
The interface was called Podio
https://podio.com/ -- now owned by Citrix :-(