Grants talk:IEG/Mediawiki extension for Community Metrics

Clarifying the benefits of this proposal

Full disclosure: I'm coordinating mw:Community metrics and I encouraged to the promoters of this proposal to submit it here since it is out of scope for the project we are developing at mediawiki.org. However, I'm not involved in the preparation of the proposal and all my feedback is channeled publicly here.

The "Project idea" section could explain a lot better what is this project about and why it is interesting for the Wikimedia movement. At the end what you are proposing is

• to develop a MediaWiki extension to visualize community metrics of free software projects like http://korma.wmflabs.org
• to test and deploy this extension at http://wikitech.wikimedia.org (Ryan Lane would be happy with this)
• to use MediaWiki as the reference platform for publishing VizGrimoire based metrics, contributing to the promotion of MediaWiki across free software projects.

Of course you can add more background information but you can have a specific subsection for this, and in any case the background should shadow the actual proposal.--Qgil (talk) 17:42, 23 September 2013 (UTC)

Licensing

What license would any and all software produced by this project be under?

Reedy (talk) 20:37, 23 September 2013 (UTC)

Open questions

• Who are you and what is your relation with VizGrimoire and MediaWiki? Or in other words: why should we trust you? :) Having more background about you in this proposal and in your user pages will help.--Qgil (talk) 17:47, 23 September 2013 (UTC)
• Have you announced this proposal anywhere? The mailing lists wikitech-l and analytics, plus mw:Community metrics come to mind. Also the development list of VizGrimoire would be sensible.--Qgil (talk) 17:49, 23 September 2013 (UTC)
• About "Create a Mediawiki theme using Bootstrap CSS technology" do you mean that MediaWiki sites willing to enable this extension must have that skin enabled? Note that we don't have any plans to have Bootstrap enables in Wikimedia sites, and in general it feels awkward that an extension forces a specific skin (other than Vector, which is the current default for MediaWiki and is fully supported. See Bug 47091 - Enable strapping-mediawiki skin in mediawiki.org as optional & experimental & mw:Requests for comment/LESS, also mw:Extension:Bootstrap.--Qgil (talk) 18:07, 23 September 2013 (UTC)
• About "Migrate http://korma.wmflabs.org/browser/ to a Mediawiki based portal do you mean starting a new wiki from scrath or integrating this extension to an existing wiki (http://wikitech.wikimedia.org would be the natural candidate)? --Qgil (talk) 18:09, 23 September 2013 (UTC)
• "Wikimedia has an Analytics group that can help in the Sustainability of this extension" - have you checked wiith them?--Qgil (talk) 18:11, 23 September 2013 (UTC)
• I'm not a person to discuss budgets but... The amount you are requesting is bigger than the maximum request allowed for IEG projects: USD 30,000. Allo, could you specify the rates per hour or day you are using for the calculations? Now it is unclear how many people will be working on these features, hence the rates are unclear.--Qgil (talk) 20:23, 23 September 2013 (UTC)

Deadline reminder, and eligibility question

Hi there! Thanks much for spending your time and energy creating this draft! Just a reminder that round 2 proposals are due 30 September 2013. If and when you've completed yours, please update the status in your infobox to status=PROPOSED so we'll know you're ready for eligibility checks and proposal review.

I'd second all of Quim's questions above and will be interested to hear replies and see any resulting clarifications added to the proposal. And I also wonder if you've got any MediaWiki volunteers interested in this proposal that would have the ability to review and integrate this Extension? As a general rule, we find that most extensions tend to take WMF engineering time to get through code review, and have thus far been one of the things that can make software proposals like this ineligible for an IEG.

Looking forward to seeing more of your thoughts! Cheers, Siko (WMF) (talk) 16:57, 25 September 2013 (UTC)

Though I agree that funding the creation of an actual extension would be out-of-scope for an IEG grant, creating a proper business case for such an extension could be within scope. I think the main reason there is so much work done on Toolserver is because developers would rather fulfill a set of personal needs rather than defend their ideas to the engineering team. If this business case could be hashed out in the way Quim has suggested, then the IEG proposal could focus on costs related to supporting future developers (and users) of the Mediawiki extension for Community Metrics. I am thinking of costs of surveys, meetups, training, etc. Jane023 (talk) 10:29, 28 September 2013 (UTC)

Good point, Jane023, there is potential to scope this project differently if that was of interested to the project team. As the proposers haven't returned to discuss or update though, we'll have to mark this ineligible for the current round, but I've asked Quim to contact them as well to encourage them to come back here to discuss or make updates for a future round if they remain interested. Cheers, Siko (WMF) (talk) 23:32, 7 April 2014 (UTC)

Ineligible for IEG - Extensions require WMF engineering time

Hi AlvaroDelCastillo and Daniel Izquierdo,

Projects that involved building Mediawiki extensions are unfortunately ineligible for IEGrants, and I haven't seen any updates from you about this yet. So, we're marking this proposal ineligible for the current round of IEG. You'd be welcome to make changes to your proposal and come back in a future round if you're able to come up with a plan to address the eligibility issue.

Best wishes, Siko (WMF) (talk) 23:37, 7 April 2014 (UTC)