Hello everyone, Following the announcement of an Enterprise MediaWiki Consortium (EMC) by Yaron Koren, Brian Wolff and others asked about the position of the MediaWiki Stakeholders' Group (MWStake) with respect to this intiative. The announced enterprise consortium seems to be a structured organisation led by Yaron. MWStake is a user group and Wikimedia affiliation. We, MWStake, care for and are open to all involved parties. Naturally, EMC is also a stakeholder in the MediaWiki world and is of course always invited to join us.
The stated goals of MWStake and the consortium are different - and complementary. MWStake is supportive of the existence of the consortium as it is of the many other organizations that contribute software to the MediaWiki ecosystem. We think Yaron's consortium can serve the purpose of providing an aggregation of funding to support development projects that might be too large for a single organization to fund themselves. However, MWStake's vision is broader. Our approach is to work as a community. We aim to foster the MediaWiki community and integrate them with concerted projects. We also seek to intensify the cooperation between third-party users and the creator/owner of MediaWiki, the Wikimedia Foundation. For that reason, the membership of MWStake consists of people from both WMF and the third-party community. We discuss common problems on a regular basis and work collaboratively towards integrative solutions and standards - because we have enough one-off solutions and extensions that reinvent the wheel. We'd like to focus on the challange of creating coherent systems. Following that approach, we aim to make the MediaWiki platform a first-class entity in the movement, as we see MediaWiki usage outside of WMF projects as part and parcel of the WMF vison. Specifically, "every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge" by providing them with the means for independently sharing their own knowledge. A word about institutionalisation: We plan to incorporate when the time is right. Presently, we think that this will be when we have finished some projects and have created a sufficiently large network of organisations and corporations that will join and contribute. Some of our accomplishments so far: We regularly open common places and communication channels for all stakeholders by organizing panels, presentations and discussions at conferences and meetings (e.g. the "Fantastic MediaWiki" track at the Hackathon in Vienna). Moreover, we are making requirements by third-party users visible (e.g. the MediaWiki user survey and feature wishlist). As individuals, we contribute to the MediaWiki project over a wide range of developments, bugfixes, code contributions and translations. These include PluggableAuth, HitCounters, DisplayTitle, extension store discussion, and more. Increasingly, we coordinate our concrete development efforts. So what are our next steps? We are going to restart the LDAP extension following the concrete plan of action which was devised in a public meeting at the Vienna Hackathon. We will improve extension documentation of extensions maintained by members of MWStake (about 100) at MediaWiki.org. And we work on the visibilty of current MediaWiki developments to foster the attractiveness of the platform. We agree with Yaron's position that the organisations EMC and MWStake actually have different goals and strategies. EMC, it seems, is mainly looking for companies which want to share maintenance costs for popular extensions. Meanwhile, MWStake seeks to integrate and coordinate the efforts around MediaWiki without requiring a monetary contribution. Any cooperation with organizations like EMC is welcome. We encourage MediaWiki users to work with Yaron and the EMC if that fits their needs, but we also welcome them to collaborate with the WMF and us to make MediaWiki better for everyone. This text was jointly written by Mark Hershberger, Cindy Cicalese, Richard Heigl, Markus Glaser MediaWiki Stakeholders Group -----Ursprüngliche Nachricht----- Von: MediaWiki-l [mailto:[email protected]] Im Auftrag von Yaron Koren Gesendet: Donnerstag, 25. Mai 2017 19:54 An: MediaWiki announcements and site admin list <[email protected]> Betreff: Re: [MediaWiki-l] Announcing: the Enterprise MediaWiki Consortium Hi Brian, That's a reasonable question. Both this consortium and the MediaWiki Stakeholders' Group have the general aim of making things better for "enterprise" users of MediaWiki, but beyond that the two have surprisingly different goals and approaches. The MediaWiki Stakeholders' Group, or MWStake, has a large number of goals, but a big part of it, as I understand, is working with the Wikimedia Foundation and core MediaWiki developers to make sure that the needs and desires of enterprise users are taken into account. That sort of advocacy is not what the EMC is concerned with. On the other hand, MWStake also does some coordination on volunteer efforts at software improvement, so in that sense the two are more similar. I'm not familiar with a corporate sponsorship thing for MWStake, but even if that happens, the two are quite different in terms of their decision-making approach. Anyone can join MWStake, and then decisions are made (as I understand it) via discussion and consensus. With the EMC, you have to pay to get in, and then there's a precise system of weighted voting to allocate the funds. It certainly could happen that the two organizations could coordinate, yes. And some companies could end up being members of both. Nonetheless, I see these as distinct organizations, and it seems like there's a need for both. Thanks! -Yaron On Thu, May 25, 2017 at 12:25 PM, Brian Wolff <[email protected]> wrote: > On Wednesday, May 24, 2017, Yaron Koren <[email protected]> wrote: > > Hi, > > > > I'm very excited to announce the launch of the Enterprise MediaWiki > > Consortium (EMC), an organization devoted to supporting and > > maintaining "enterprise MediaWiki" software. > > > > As you may know, a lot of open-source software has some sort of > > organization or foundation that is intended to pool money from users > > of > the > > software toward developers. MediaWiki is in an unusual situation: it > > is funded by the Wikimedia Foundation (and, to a lesser extent, > > Wikimedia Deutschland and others), but those organizations' primary > > allegiance is > to > > software that runs on Wikimedia sites. That leaves a lot of > > MediaWiki-related software (extensions, skins, etc.) that is mostly > > intended for use on non-Wikimedia sites, i.e. "enterprise" uses: > > some of this software has significant usage, but very little of it > > has institutional support. > > > > That is where the Enterprise MediaWiki Consortium fits in. It is > > intended to fund the development of extensions and other software > > that otherwise > has > > no funding source. The set of software being funded is entirely up > > to the membership of the EMC, and of course the amount of support > > that can be provided depends on the amount of money that members > > contribute - an > amount > > that will hopefully grow over time. > > > > If you belong to an organization, company or website that makes use > > of MediaWiki - and specifically, of MediaWiki-related software not > > used on Wikimedia sites - please consider joining the Enterprise > > MediaWiki Consortium - to provide much-needed support for the > > software you use, and to have a greater say in shaping its future. > > > > You can read more about the EMC here: > > > > http://enterprisemediawikiconsortium.org/ > > > > -Yaron > > _______________________________________________ > > MediaWiki-l mailing list > > To unsubscribe, go to: > > https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mediawiki-l > > > > Out of curiosity, what is the relation between this group and > MWStakeholders group. Im given to understand that MWStake was also > considering having a corporate sponsership thing too (I may bemistaken > on that though). Do you envision the two groups working together, or > do you see them as being entirely separate and independent? > > Best of luck in this new venture, > > -- > Brian > _______________________________________________ > MediaWiki-l mailing list > To unsubscribe, go to: > https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mediawiki-l > -- WikiWorks · MediaWiki Consulting · http://wikiworks.com _______________________________________________ MediaWiki-l mailing list To unsubscribe, go to: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mediawiki-l _______________________________________________ MediaWiki-l mailing list To unsubscribe, go to: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mediawiki-l
