Blog by Sumana Harihareswara, Changeset founder
Work And Being Realistic
Hi, reader. I wrote this in 2011 and it's now more than five years old. So it may be very out of date; the world, and I, have changed a lot since I wrote it! I'm keeping this up for historical archive purposes, but the me of today may 100% disagree with what I said then. I rarely edit posts after publishing them, but if I do, I usually leave a note in italics to mark the edit and the reason. If this post is particularly offensive or breaches someone's privacy, please contact me.
This month I'll briefly be in Mumbai for a Wikimedia developers' meetup. Developers and translators will be working on mobile and offline access, localization, and general knowledge sharing about Wikimedia technologies. If you're interested in coming by, let me know.
Selected recent Wikimedia (work) stuff: Guillaume Paumier did important foundational work in collecting and integrating information for a MediaWiki architectural overview and history. I've already pointed newbies to it at least five times to explain something. And the first MediaWiki 1.18 beta release is out so people can download and test that. We're hiring for like a dozen technical positions. There's so much going on that if I go on I'll end up repeating our monthly reports.
Perhaps more interestingly, my current crusade is patch review. When new technical volunteers show up, perhaps trying to scratch their own itch or get started with an annoying little easy bug, they contribute patches in our Bugzilla. We're not reviewing and responding to them consistently and quickly enough; there are more than 260 patches awaiting a response, some dating back years and thus suffering bitrot. So, the workflow isn't working. I'm working on figuring out what's broken and how to fix it.
All my Wikimedia work and travel has kept me from my previous big open source commitment, GNOME. I've been saying to friends and GNOME teammates for some time now that I can't keep up, and am now unsubscribing from the GNOME Marketing and GNOME Journal team email lists in recognition of that fact. It hurts, but it's better not to pretend to commitments one can't keep. Fortunately, Emily (Rose? not sure of her last name) & Sriram Ramkrishna have done a great service in moving GNOME Journal to a modern publishing system at https://thegnomejournal.wordpress.com/. It looks like they'll take over running and editing it, which is lovely. Paul Cutler and I simply have not had the time to give this information channel the attention it deserves, so he and I asked for others to step in and take over, and I am glad to see Sri's, Emily's, Allan Day's, and others' energy pushing forward to keep the GNOME and FLOSS communities informed about GNOME happenings.
We are in this together. It's like the geek feminist saying goes:
Let's say that fighting sexism is like a chorus of people singing a continuous tone. If enough people sing, the tone will be continuous even though each of the singers will be stopping singing to take a breath every now and then. The way to change things is for more people to sing rather than for the same small group of people to try to sing louder and never breathe.
The demands of scaling up imply, somewhat recursively, that in my role coordinating and recruiting volunteers, I need to also recruit people who will coordinate and recruit volunteers. I'm working on it.
