Grants talk:Project/Timeless/Post-deployment support/Final

@Isarra: Thanks for submitting your final report on your Project Grant for Timeless. Also happy to say I have reviewed your report using Timeless as well-- it's a neat look! :) I am accepting your report now and have the following comments:

• First, I want to say I appreciate the level of honesty with which you have written this report— both around successes you have celebrated, and around challenges that were sometimes deeply frustrating in improving Timeless and ascertaining the process of developing a new Wikimedia skin. This kind of writing is helpful in better understanding what your experience was like doing the work, in addition to understanding the specific tasks and outcomes related to your goals. I'm glad you pulled specific examples to illustrate discussions, enhancements, and bugs to highlight these experiences as well.
• The new logo looks really sharp! I'm glad some time was taken to illustrate what you want your project to represent and have some fun with it. : )
• ...But we do indeed now have a more complete, more stable product. I have bumped the version from 0.8.1 to 0.8.9, and have even been recommended to maybe bump it all the way to version 1.0, but that seems a bit premature when we're still having tables overflow all over the place and largely just blaming it on everyone else.
  • While I'm not a developer, and can't comment on the suitability of whether Timeless is ready enough to bump to version 1.0 or not, I agree that your project impact reflects the fact that Timeless is a more complete, and more stable skin as you've noted here. Timeless is compatible with modern browsers, more gadgets, user scripts, and extensions work with it (even if this compatibility was incidental due to general standardization work-- also, some of these do not work with more prevalent skins).
• Your insights in the learning pattern you prepared are especially valuable. Your statement of the problem – that approaches to skins and related software are not consistent in our open-source community, that expectations exist but are not clearly documented or consistently followed, and that we've developed makeshift solutions to problems that later on become challenging to work with in this context – is a good summary of the environment one is likely face in this kind of work. That you've recommended to others that they carefully consider aspects of scope, priority, and familiarity with relevant interfaces in their development work is helpful preparation for navigating these understandably difficult circumstances.
• What we do know is this: usage has gone up overall, both on Wikimedia projects, and third-party MediaWiki sites.
  • While the specific desired data wasn't available due to access restrictions, the data you presented here on how many accounts have adopted Timeless, an example of active editors and total accounts using the skin on French Wikipedia, and its adoption on Mediawiki sites broadly provides some good evidence that usage of Timeless is off to a good start and has grown as you and others have worked to make Timeless more stable and compatible. Thanks for taking the time to collect these other indicators.
• Whatever the case, we had some thoughts on our experience with the RFC process.
  • I had a chance to read through these RFCs and your reflections on them, and I'm glad to see your feedback in the conversation around the RFC process used in technical decisions. I hope your feedback is considered and incorporated into process revisions as I believe it can help support future participation from volunteer developers. I think the matter around a lack of feedback on RfCs is challenging, especially when there are so few people working in or who have expertise in a specific domain. Ideally, proposals that move forward (whether coming from a volunteer or Wikimedia Foundation staff) should have some degree of support. I hope we can move in a direction where expectations for technical RFCs are the same for all participants and are clearer upfront.

If you have any responses or comments, please feel free to leave them below. Thanks for all the work you have done developing and reporting on Timeless. I JethroBT (WMF) (talk) 21:02, 18 September 2019 (UTC)

@I JethroBT (WMF): Thank you for your review and comments, and for all the support you and your team have provided over the course of all of this! -— Isarra ༆ 23:45, 19 September 2019 (UTC)