This page contains summaries of meeting minutes for the Product & Technology working group, one among the nine working groups involved in the Wikimedia Movement 2018-20 Strategy process. The full versions of these minutes are accessible on Etherpad, but given their extensive length and detail, only their summaries are being shared here for the time being.

2019[edit]

September[edit]

12 September[edit]

Thinking about mandates at the Harmonization Sprint in Tunis and the changes occurring after it.
Members who are not present in Tunis will not be participating online, but they would like clarification on their role. Other WGs also considered online check-in (possibly to be done over Slack).
Franziska to be brought up to speed (the Core Team is happy to help). No clear roles for participants other than reading all recommendations.
The Principles document would help with harmonization. There are already common themes, like decentralization. The document should also mention 'ensuring capacity building'.
The next meeting, on September 19th, will be cancelled for the Sprint.
The WG will have one last meeting after Tunis to wrap up. The purpose will be to review recommendations (no to re-write them). Members will then have the option to continue working on Meta-recommendations.

August[edit]

29 August[edit]

Agendas for the in-person meeting are to integrate feedback, research, finalize recommendations, initiating harmonization and working on the principles document.
The Core Team will gather the doucments which WG members may need for the meeting. Send invites to Franziska and high priority WGs.
Katherine Maher should be made aware of the slow progress of research and P&T work, as well as the 3rd party developer system recommendation.
Recommendations will be filtered for the purpose of harmonization and to mark programmatic ones.
Receive feedback from Toby, Leila and Erica.

22 August[edit]

Wikimania debrief: The feedback on the session was positive and constructive, suggested that the recommendations should be more concrete and pointed out issues with the third party/developer community recommendation. Overlap with other WGs needs follow up as not much happened during the conference, apart from a brief conversation with Diversity. The WG representatives met with Lisa Lewin and Peter Dewald (both went well).

There was a discussion regarding the issue with the majority of the funding going towards technology. All other WG recommendations referring to technology should be highlighted for discussion, especially the groups closely aligned (e.g. Diversity).

In-person meeting & preparation: The agenda for the meeting is to reach a clear understanding for harmonization and to review other WGs overlap. More outreach and evidence is still needed to support the recommendations. The OTS document isn't helpful in its present form.

8 August[edit]

Wikimania: The Core Team will take notes during the Strategy session. WG representatives would prefer using time to engage with community members rather than attending other WGs sessions. The recommendations tackling tools should come after those related to Product definition.

Overlap with other WGs will be further explored after Wikimania. Gradient of Agreement will be used to formally process recommendations during the in-person meeting. Feedback from C level staff, KM, Danny & John and any product engineer can be used for further reviews.

1 August[edit]

Recommendations review:

Decentralizayion recommendation: Some changes were made to the language. Some prefer if it would be more compact.
Deployment Council: Feedback indicated it was too broad, so it was split into 3 recommendations. Good as a draft.
Support Commuity Decision-making: Ready.
Open Product Proposal Process: Ready.
Proof of Concept Team and Process: Not to be submitted due to lack of content.
New Developer Engagement Models: Ready.
Grow the Third-party Ecosystem: Ready.
Emerging Technology Ethics Advisory Panel: Comments will be resolved.
Monitoring Product and Societal Impact: Ready (will have more re-work later).

Research: Update on research status. The members are disappointed with the OTS research (will be passed on). The decision is to proceed with it, though.

Community Conversations: Reach out to specific UGs and communities for feedback using the toolkit. The toolkit is too generic in its present form but can be customized for more useful application.

In-person meeting: To be held after Wikimania.

July[edit]

25 July[edit]

Reviewing recommendations:

Decentralization: Needs cleanup and re-phrasing. Matanya and Kate to review.
Support Community Decision-making: Supported but is tackling too many technical aspects instead of social ones.
Open up Product Governance: Change the term Technology Council. The recommendation is too packed.
Adopt a New Engagement Model for the Developer Community: It's speaking of a current state rather than a future goal.
Growing the Third-party Ecosystem: Support. Depeneding on further research by the WG.
Emerging Technology Ethics Advisory Panel: Comments will be addressed.
Monitoring Product and Societal Impact: Needs careful wording. Will be reviewed by Josh.

Harmonization Sprint: Gergo and Matanya are selected as representatives, with Josh as a backup option.

Outreach: Will hold on before sharing the current set of recommendations with other WGs.

18 July[edit]

The recommendations should be ready by next week. Writing each of them takes about an hour. Determine priorities before writing recommendations:

Decentralization: Kate
Community Decision-making: Cheol and Gergo
Proof of Concept: Stephane/Asen
Governance: hold on for now.
Ethics Advisory: James
Role in Society: Josh
Funding: Josh (to review and report relevant refrences).

Overlap with other WGs: The progress of other WGs will be requested during the Steerign Group call. Josh will seek connections with RA and R&R.

Fleshing out of the recommendations will be left to Srishti (IKM will set a deadline for the task).

There will be an extra meeting for the WG next week due to the deadline for recommendations submission on August 1st.

4 July[edit]

Platform evolution/Software Recommendation: Brainstorm how to decentralize development. The recommendation can help think strategically. The Team is poor at developing community tools.
Create teams for proof-of-concept and for community discussions. Flesh out these two by referring back to the recommendations format.
Create a knowledge disseimnation team to ensure community members understanding of strategic decisions (parked for later).
Considering adopting new, innovative technologies (matched with the one above).
Make FDC reivew WMF budget for reals: topic for RA.
Volunteer Developer Community: Will be forwarded to Shrishti.
Research update: SoW document was reviewed and approved by the WG members. The research should be ready around the time for Wikimania.
Subgroups to flesh out the themes of recommendations as follows:
- Developer Community+Adopting New Community Engagement Models: Will be flushed out (Shrishti, Matanya and Cheol).
- Funding: Gergo and Asen (in place of Stephane).
- Role in Society: Reach out to Franziska.

June[edit]

20 June[edit]

Introducing Mehrdad: New member of the Core Team providing additional support.

Sub-group status report:

Platform Evolution/Software Recommendation: Needs more brainstorming (some added).
Developer Community
Funding: Add brainstorming, needs sorting out.
Role in Society: No progress (new members will be invited to contribute).

In-person meeting: Decided to be held in Europe post Wikimania.

Community Conversations: Community members are not understanding the distinction between structural and programmatic planning, thus presenting very detailed, irrelevant feedback. The Core Team/IKM needs to address the issue.

Outreach and WG liaison check-in: The WG should focus on their own deliverables for now, as the WG overlap conversations can happen at Wikimania. The members, however, are okay with sharing their recommendations with other WGs (will be shared by IKM).

Research status report: OTS were approchaed to conduct the research and they're willing to do it but have doubts about the proposed timeline.

6 June[edit]

Sub-group activities: A rough draft of recommendations is required before Wikimania. Every sub-group will brainstorm ideas and share the output with the rest of the members (by June 18th). Sub-groups should be having their own conversations, possibly meetings, beyond the common group call. The recommendations will then be flushed out by each sub-group (by July 4th), and finalized by July 18th to achieve the final agrement before Wikimania.

There might be a need for translation before Wikimania, as was the case with the Scoping Document. The sub-groups will do check-ins two days prior to their delivery deadline, which will be led by the sub-group coordinator. The coordinators are: Funding (Gergo); Developer Community (Matanya); Role in Society (Gergo); Platform Evolution and Software Features (Kate).

A shared document with the current sub-groups will be created for those who weren't on the calls or are interested joining multiple groups.

Community Conversations and liaisons: Franziska is assigned a liason role, but apprently making no progress. There was no contact with other WGs. People can sign up as liasons with other WGs, for example with Revenue Streams for the Funding recommendation. Gergo volunteers to be a liaison for the community conversations (to read the Core Team summaries and answer comments).

Steering Group Call: Equity lens observations. The WG needs to move further and put recommendations in place. The deadline for Wikimania submissions (outside the Strategy space) is by Monday, June 10th. Each WG can get about five hours of discussion time for Wikimania planning, can be extended.

Other business: Contact with Whose Knowledge will continue until July. Matanya and Cheol will represent the WG at Wikimania. Requesting all WG members to express their availability for the Harmonization Sprint.

May[edit]

23 May[edit]

Recommendations sub-groups: Time commitment of members. Shrishti didn't feel her time is being well used in the meetings, but is still happy to help with the Developer community Strategy. Other members expressed interest in the sub-groups for Funding, Role in Society, Platform Evolution, Developer Community and Software Features.

The recommendation format is now available in an updated version. The next steps are to determine the internal sub-groups to build the recommendations. The scope are available on Metawiki.

Research: The Core Team has some suggested names of external consultants that can help. The group members are to veto names (Markus Glaser, Maria Miteva, Joan Touzet, Open Tech Strategies, Otter Technology). There's a concern about potential cases of conflict of interest, as some of them are practically part of the Movement.

Community Conversations: The format is approved and the group will go ahead with it. Gergo also had a presentation with chapters and community members (the slides are available here.

Assen's application: The Core Team would like the WG to consider Assen's application, as they can use more diversity at this point. Members feel positively about the application and about having extra help.

Wikimania and Harmonization Sprint: Gergo is joining Wikimania as a staff member. Wikimania representation, however, requires full dedication to the Strategy process. Present WG members expressed their potential availbility for the conference, with no decisions made for now.

9 May[edit]

Whose Knowledge: Each WG has five hours of meeting time with Whose Knowledge. It's not clear how they can help with the Product & Technology theme, though. Other WGs have had different approaches: using them as a partner or a sparing partner. Based on this, P&T would like to use the meeting time to discuss draft recommendations (instead of scoping).

Resources and external support: The budgeting will be done by the Core Team. The document is ready, it would be preferred for WG members to review it and approve.

Coordinators: The recommendations should be ready a bit before Wikimania (three months from now). The coordinator's role is to keep an eye on emails and on the group, as well as to/from report to other WGs, and to attend the meeting on Tuesday (more is available on Metawiki). The weekly meetings were useful and should be returned until there's an alternative. There's a bit of a controversey on whether meetings are the best way to use volunteer time. Setlling on bi-weekly meetings (delayed two hours from the regular time) with an email/Slack check-in inbetween.

New members: The Core Team reached out to the new members (Christophe and Kristina). The CT can also onboard them in a brief call or leave it to the WG to do that.

Moving ahead: The recommendation format template is now available. Small teams will proceed with the recommendation drafting (just like scoping). Part of a buddy conversation.

Community Conversations: The feedback doesn't refer much to P&T. Liaisons should also look at the feedback.

Calendar review/accomplishments: The list of research topics is complete. There's also the input from other WGs (at Wikimedia Summit) to incorporate. The group can create a draft recommendation and consult for feedback so that it doesn't represent only their own views. One issue is that feedback is often specific/programmatic while scoping is on a high, strategic level. WG members are to proactively reach out to communiy members for more input with specific, high level questions.

April[edit]

11 April[edit]

Wikimedia Summit debrief: The Summit was split into two parts: one for affiliate members and another for working groups. There was a lot of discussion with all of those about the scoping questions. The Summit wasn't, however, a good opportunity for WGs to connect together. A summary of the event is already shared.

Responsibilities: The Scoping Document moving to the next phase. External support or consultancy is being considered. The Core Team will provide clarity on the budget once the WG requests a consultancy. Task sto be visualized. Having less meetings means getting less work done. There's a need to define the workflow for the recommendations. Areas of research should be identified, poential ones are about how other Open Source organizations are handling their software.

liaisons with other WGs: A collective document will be created to provide feedback to other WGs. Stephane willn't be available from June onwards, thus would like someone else to take over the coordinator role.

Group meetings: Some members are interested in less meetings and more asychronuous work. A slack channel will be set up for communication inbetween calls. Meetings will be suspended for one month to achieve more individual work. Need a dedicated person to remind the team of their tasks.

March[edit]

21 March[edit]

Review of actions: All the scoping documents are on Metawiki. The table is done and Tanveer sent out an email to the members.

Wikimedia Summit: Usually there's a one hour session, or a slide then reading and questions. It will be an opportunity to present work, connect with other WGs and onboard new members. Corey will be a P&T mandate, any presentation materials are to be sent to her.

Liaisons with other WGs: It would be helpful to identify overlap with other groups. R&R are a major point of connections, same for Advocacy (can ask them about missing governance process), Partnerships and pretty much all WGs. A document will be created for the group to record ovelraps, comments and questions, as well as to choose the mandates at Wikimedia Summit.

Other WGs, WMF, WMDE or people at the Summit are to consulted of whether the recommendations are tackling a high level or are programmatic in nature. It's important to specify whether members are in the Summit on behalf of the WG or wearing a different hat.

14 March[edit]

Scoping document comments: The Working Group missed the deadline to provide feedback from the Core Team on their scoping document, which is to be submitted for translation. However, there are opportunities to incorporate feedback from community conversations, organised groups and affiliates in the next few weeks, for integration in the Scoping document of the Working Group.

Planning the next few weeks: Next steps before the Wikimedia Summit will include: asynchronous work, improvement of the Scoping document, and a review of other Working Groups’ scoping documents

Subgroups can be created to review the documents, and Convert questions that were formed earlier to action items from the scoping questions depending on members’ availability.
Working with other working groups to see where the overlap is across groups. For example Community Health is interested in Product & Technology.
Action items that require budget can be flagged with a rationale, and resources so that the Core Team can advance requests after the summit.

Identifying expertise, external support: There’s need to invite all the members of the group to add references, existing resources, and documentation to what questions we want to focus on and use the created document as a place for agenda planning for the time in Berlin.

Gergo will create a new document that can accommodate the above resources.

Faster communication channels: During the next stages of the process like analysing scoping documents of other Working groups, e-mail communication might not be a quick turnaround for communication to allocate Scoping work, other communication channels were proposed.

This will be part of the email that Core Team will send out
Anna Luikens will invite members of the Working Group to participate and help plan the sessions for effective facilitation.

Onboarding new members: The community conversations and Wikimedia Summit will be a good opportunity to identify good candidates for this Working Group, existing members are informed that the option of including new members is still open and they can communicate with the Core Team for onboarding.

February[edit]

January[edit]