Talk:Community Relations/Planning

Going beyond quarters

This page talks about setting quarterly goals. It has been suggested that we try and look beyond this timeframe. We could sit down in a "brainstorming" fashion and write a list of goals, inspired by our commitments in the Annual Plan, and then pick the ones we like the most and tentatively schedule them for a quarter or another. Of course any goal could be moved if the need arises, and others may be added, but this would still enormously help us plan strategic work, rather than getting caught in the daily one. We are never going to tackle epic issues unless we plan the related work across a few quarters or more; otherwise we'll always keep pushing those back to the mythological moment of "whenever we have time" and give them a lower priority. This would also help spare some time during the quarters, because we are usually asked to come up with the goals right when we're trying to finalize the current ones, and that's distracting. --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 10:02, 25 August 2016 (UTC)

I agree. To make this easier, I'm posting the annual goals here (sans translation markup). How do you feel about taking these and figuring out when they need to be done, if we want to get this finished by June 2017? Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 13:22, 25 August 2016 (UTC)

Yes, this is a very good idea. Keegan is already working in a timeline of objectives for the TCG, and then we have the calendar of events and programs which is known as well. Due to the agile nature of Product's work (a good thing) it is probably better to be simply ready to agree on goals following the quarterly cadence.--Qgil-WMF (talk) 08:12, 26 August 2016 (UTC)

This year's goals

Program 7: Improve collaboration with communities in product development

Team: Technical Collaboration

The Technical Collaboration team helps developers build features in collaboration with our communities. We support Foundation’s Product teams, volunteer developers, tech ambassadors, and other contributors who want to get involved in the planning, development, and deployment of Wikimedia software features. We act as liaisons between non-technical communities and developers, and we organize developer outreach programs and events, in order to create software tools and other products to be used by Wikimedia communities.

Goal 1: Continue Community liaison support for Foundation Product goals

• Objective 1 - Liaise with communities: Throughout FY16-17, when requested – allocate community liaison support for Foundation Product initiatives related to quarterly goals.
• Objective 2 – Participate in audience planning: Throughout FY16-17, participate in the planning process of Foundation Product teams, offering crucial feedback for our Product releases.
• Objective 3 – Facilitate all major product conversations: Throughout FY16-17, facilitate in and – when appropriate – moderate all major conversations involving Wikimedia communities and WMF Product teams.

Goal 2: Create a systematic approach to community engagement for product development teams

In 2016/17, the Technical Collaboration team will support the Foundation in its commitment to engage the community earlier and throughout the product development process, through systematic communication, discussion, and decisions.

• Objective 1 – Initiate a guideline for technical collaboration between WMF teams and the communities: By the end of FY16-17, in collaboration with communities, initiate a “Technical Collaboration Guideline” that allows Product teams and Wikimedia communities to work together in a systematic way by establishing best practices for community involvement in the product development and deployment cycle.
• Objective 2 – Facilitate wide adoption of the community engagement guideline: By the end of FY16-17, work to have all Foundation Product teams and a majority of the top 20 most-active Wikimedia projects integrate their technical decision processes with the community engagement guideline, as evidenced by community decisions and requests, as well as their processing by WMF teams.
• Objective 3 – Integrate community engagement more closely with early Foundation product development stages: By the end of FY16-17, work to integrate community engagement more closely into the pre-release stages of product development, when Product researches, conceives, and plans a new release. In parallel, decrease the frequency of major discussions associated with the Release stage of a product.

Program 8: Connect volunteer developer work with community technical needs

Team: Technical Collaboration

Goal: Connect free software developers with the 2015 Community Wishlist Survey maintained by the Community Tech team

In the fall of 2015, the Foundation invited contributors to submit proposals for what the Community Tech team should do to improve or produce curation and moderation tools for active contributors. That wishlist provides a jumping-off point for the efforts of the Foundation Technical Collaboration team.

• Objective 1 – Encourage volunteer focus on addressing community priorities: By the end of FY16-17, work with volunteer developers to complete 10 technical community requests that have strong demand.
• Objective 2 – Encourage hackathon and outreach work into community requests: By the end of FY16-17, help Foundation hackathons and outreach programs, such as Google Summer of Code, to increase their impact by focusing their work toward popular community requests.
• Objective 3 – Better connect developers with tasks and mentors: By the end of FY16-17, improve the ability of new volunteer developers to find useful tasks and mentors easily, increasing the focus on deploying useful features. Progress will be measured with a community health survey for Wikimedia technical spaces.

I was thinking of copying our annual plan goals and slap them in an own page under Technical Collaboration. You were faster pasting them here, thank you! Still, what about moving them to an own content page, with a discussion page focusing on those goals? This would open the door to the creation of a team annual goals page for 2017-18 as soon as that process start, allowing for drafting and discussion in one page since the beginning.--Qgil-WMF (talk) 08:08, 26 August 2016 (UTC)

I don't care what page it's on. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 07:37, 29 August 2016 (UTC)

What to do when

Here's how I see these things working out:

Program 7, Goal 1

1. This is primary work for the Community Liaisons, so "quarterly planning" is mostly a matter of figuring out which teams have what products or features in flight for each quarter. We probably won't have this list settled until the last possible moment. Link to Product's Annual Plan.
   • Editing – Multimedia needs information about the gallery feature. The 2017 wikitext editor will need Beta Feature support during Q2, and probably a larger set of deployment discussions in Q4. (There are probably a dozen discussions that could be listed in this large product area, so these are just examples.)
   • Reading – ?
   • Discovery – ?
   • Tech Ops – further work on the server switching systems, probably Q2 and again later in the year
   • Community Wishlist – The survey will be repeated in Q2.
2. There's a major planning session for the Editing vertical in Q2. Participating in that would be appropriate for this objective. I don't know whether Reading and Discovery have anything similar in their plans.
3. I do understand how this differs from objective #1, but in terms of the process for choosing quarterly goals, there's no reason to separate this from #1.

Program 7, Goal 2

This is User:Keegan (WMF)'s territory. I believe that he's working mostly on objective #1 at the moment, and making some progress on #3 as well. Perhaps he'd like to post some information about how he expects these to get divided up over the remaining quarters; otherwise, I assume that it's one goal per quarter between now and the end of the year.

Rough timeline is here. Keegan (WMF) (talk) 17:27, 25 August 2016 (UTC)

Program 8

1. I believe that this is meant to be separate from hackathons.
2. Work on this objective will happen in (at least):
   • Q2 – preparing for the Dev Summit
   • Q3 – the Dev Summit + preparing for the Vienna Hackathon
   • Q4 – the Vienna Hackathon + Google Summer of Code + preparing for the Wikimania Hackathon
3. Helping new devs find things to work on and figure out how to be productive could be done at any time.

Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 14:29, 25 August 2016 (UTC)

List

Annual plan	Q2	Q3	Q4
Program 7, Goal 1	Whatever Product needs Beta Feature support for the 2017 wikitext editor Community wishlist Multimedia gallery slider? Tech Ops' server switch? Attend Editing's planning meeting	Whatever Product needs ?	Whatever Product needs Discussions about 2017 wikitext editor
Program 7, Goal 2	review the TCG draft test-drive the TCG draft	test-drive the TCG draft	Discuss the TCG (and recent results) with WMF and communities
Program 8	Prepare for the Dev Summit	Dev Summit Prepare for the Vienna Hackathon	Vienna Hackathon Google Summer of Code Prepare for the Wikimania Hackathon