English: Presentation slides for Wikimania 2023
Title: Discuss improvements to our collective decision-making processes for software releases
Speaker: Olga Vasileva, Szymon Grabarczuk, Johan Jönsson
Abstract: Let’s discuss the ways we make collective decisions about our software development and release process and brainstorm ways we can make the process smoother and more representative of everyone who uses the Wikimedia wikis. Newcomers are welcome!
The objective of this session is to discuss how the Wikimedia Foundation and wiki communities can improve the ways we collectively make decisions around software development. This includes the processes we take for any technical changes on our wikis that are visible to readers and editors - new tools, interface improvements, and more. In particular, we seek to make our processes more inclusive, data-driven, and representative of larger parts of our communities and audiences and to find ways to ensure that communities are better-informed of upcoming changes and have easy ways to participate in forums and conversations throughout the development process.
We would like to engage with participants who have previously taken part of or are interested in collective decision-making processes within and across wikis. Newcomers are welcome to the discussion!
The session will start with a brief overview of the current state of these processes. We will characterize the recent examples of wiki discussions, RfCs, wish lists, and larger consultations to identify what is working well and what the main problems are.
The second part of the session will include a structured brainstorm, followed by open conversation on what potential solutions to these problems might look like. We will invite participants to share their experiences with these processes and their suggestions for improvements. We will review suggestions for improvements and look at the ways in which the Movement strategy has proposed ways of developing better practices in the future.
Our goal is to begin a conversation about changes that participants and communities are interested about, which, after Wikimania, can develop and grow on-wiki and lead to important process improvements in the future. We hope that with these changes implemented, the way software development decisions are made will be much more inclusive, particularly for the emerging communities and occasional users.
Presented at: Suntec Singapore Convention and Exhibition Centre, 2023-08-18 06:15 to 07:15 UTC
Video file: File:Wikimania 2023 - Room 311 - 18 August - Discuss improvements to our collective decision-making processes for software releases.webm