Talk:Wikimedia Product Guidance/Community involvement

Dev involvement, community patches, collaborative design

Stray thoughts that I missed here + might be incorporated:

Consultations are not the same as collaborative design. If a consult looks like hundreds of duplicative inputs, that are never refactored or curated into something more, w/ an all-staff group is asking questions and a no-staff group giving all the answers, that's probably not collaborative design :) Better for a design group to work in public, developing & prioritizing questions, and then answering them together, including answering one another. Better again if the design product/design includes both staff and non-staff contributors.

Code review and attention to community code contribs: A really good collab will have community devs with review capabilities and commitment to fast turnaround for patch submissions.

Attributing motivation: if the motivation + idea comes from a community request, or a particular project or program that needs the work, attribute that and honor the time taken to formulate the original need + turn it into a spec. If it comes from research or observations or staff interest or a top-down mandate (legal? spiritual?) from someone not in either community or development teams, note that too. If a product is hoping to replace and subsume an existing workflow or product with different features or maintenance requirements, note that and how this affects people maintaining what existed before.

Being involved with + responsible for downstream impacts: how does this change documentation, existing outreach and work? Who updates those things, how is that coordinated with something new being announced to the world? Sj (talk) 20:17, 24 January 2023 (UTC)

Hey, thanks for your thoughts. I'll notify the team about them and will get back to you at some point. --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 11:21, 25 January 2023 (UTC)

This said, I will go ahead and say this (and eventually we may not have much to add); WPG has been our northern star since my team wrote it with Product. We're now in a different age I would say, where the fact that we have new leadership shared with Tech + we are developing other guidance already will likely mean that what's on this page will need a refresh at some point soon and/or even merging. LMK if this makes sense to you. (Also I should note that our c-level has been very clear in the past about wanting motivation to be documented well and I recommended that it becomes a point for the Inclusive PD guide back then already.)--Elitre (WMF) (talk) 11:38, 25 January 2023 (UTC)