Grants:IdeaLab/Community prioritised IT developments

Idealab

Community prioritised IT developments

Reserve some of the IT budget for the community to nominate and prioritise IT enhancements.

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idea creator• WereSpielChequers

this project needs...

volunteer

created on21:35, 3 August 2015 (UTC)

Project idea

What is the problem you're trying to solve?

The WMF has somewhere in excess of a thousand suggestions as to how to improve our IT, they struggle to find the resource to prioritise them at all, let alone to pick good as opposed to damaging or just wasteful developments.

The WMF has in recent years chosen several high profile IT investments that have annoyed and directly or indirectly damaged the community, in some cases they have been major drains on volunteer resource as well as movement cash.

Part of the attraction of volunteering as a wikimedian is the control of the projects where you volunteer, and collective decision making in major changes to those projects. Getting a community influence on IT project initiation and prioritisation should in theory be as positive for community health as the opposite has proven unhealthy, especially if the projects work well

What is your solution?

Ringfence part of the WMF IT budget for projects chosen and prioritised by the community.

Developers would still have a role to play both in terms of saying whether a development could be written, what the hardware costs and approximate development time would be.

Any wikimedian would have four votes that they could cast for particular developments,

Developments with the highest ratio of votes to cost would then be developed until the money runs out.

• • • • • • • Real examples with guessed costs - fell free to add examples or vote on these

Concept	Projects	Rationale	Cost	Votes	Cost/votes
Halve edit conflicts	All	Edit conflicts are one of the biggest biters of newbies.	99,000	1	99,000
image based search	Commons	Image searches based on image recognition	999,000	1	999,000
Event organisers Userright	Wikipedia	Make outreach events easier to do	29,000	1	29,000
Flow	All	New way to do talkpages	999,000	0	∞
CRLF to \n	All	Save maybe about 1/80th of bandwidth	20,000?	2	10,000ish
your	pet project	here	cost?	vote?
your	pet project	here	cost?	vote?
your	pet project	here	cost?	vote?
your	pet project	here	cost?	vote?
your	pet project	here	cost?	vote?
your	pet project	here	cost?	vote?

Get involved

Sign below with a hash and four tildas, and/or add your favourite projects or vote for projects in the table above - four votes per editor!

1. WereSpielChequers (talk) 21:42, 3 August 2015 (UTC)